From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Fri May  1 05:20:27 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 05:20:27 -0000
Subject: Right vs. Easy (Ron WAS: Re: DH reread CH 4-5)
In-Reply-To: <gt3a73+24na@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gte0qr+l6n4@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186393

> Here is the famous phrase in context:
> 
> > GoF:
> > "Remember Cedric. Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory."
> 
> Zara:
> I don't see where your definition of "easy" fits in the context of this speech. Albus does not speak of Voldemort offering people rewards and blandishments, he speaks of Voldemort "spreading discord and enmity". He warns of "dark times", "suffering", and families "torn asunder". And he finishes by asking people to remember Cedric (murdered by Voldemort) when they have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy. 
> 
Montavilla47:

That's such an ironic speech.  Because Cedric is one of the characters
we actually see make a *right* choice in the temptation of taking the
easy way out.  

At the end of the tournament, both Harry and Cedric are in sight of
the Cup, but Harry has a leg injury and Cedric does not.  He could
easily take the Cup and become the Champion of Hogwarts, but 
he doesn't, because, according to his code of honor, it wouldn't be
right.  

So, he and Harry agree to take the Cup together--a decision that
leads to Cedric's death.

So, when we do get to see someone make the clear choice of
"right" over "easy," he dies five minutes later.






From gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk  Fri May  1 06:56:13 2009
From: gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk (Geoff Bannister)
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 06:56:13 -0000
Subject: Right vs. Easy (Ron WAS: Re: DH reread CH 4-5)
In-Reply-To: <gte0qr+l6n4@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gte6ed+aug@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186394

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "montavilla47" <montavilla47 at ...> wrote:

Montavilla47:
> That's such an ironic speech.  Because Cedric is one of the characters
> we actually see make a *right* choice in the temptation of taking the
> easy way out.  
> 
> At the end of the tournament, both Harry and Cedric are in sight of
> the Cup, but Harry has a leg injury and Cedric does not.  He could
> easily take the Cup and become the Champion of Hogwarts, but 
> he doesn't, because, according to his code of honor, it wouldn't be
> right.  
> 
> So, he and Harry agree to take the Cup together--a decision that
> leads to Cedric's death.
> 
> So, when we do get to see someone make the clear choice of
> "right" over "easy," he dies five minutes later.

Geoff:
There is a double irony here because Harry could have taken 
the "easy" way, acceeded to Cedric's urging to go ahead and 
take the Cup.

Instead, he opts for the "right" way which is to coax Cedric into
joining him.





From willsonkmom at msn.com  Fri May  1 12:09:19 2009
From: willsonkmom at msn.com (potioncat)
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 12:09:19 -0000
Subject: Right vs. Easy (Ron WAS: Re: DH reread CH 4-5)
In-Reply-To: <gte6ed+aug@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gteopf+tbqc@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186395

 
> Geoff:
> There is a double irony here because Harry could have taken 
> the "easy" way, acceeded to Cedric's urging to go ahead and 
> take the Cup.
> 
> Instead, he opts for the "right" way which is to coax Cedric into
> joining him.


Potioncat:
Even in the WW the rain falls on the just and the unjust. In the real world doing the right thing doesn't always come with a reward, that's why it isn't always easy.

I have always been taken by DD's contrasting right with easy. Not right vrs wrong or right vrs not-so-good, but right vrs easy. It comes to mind many times in my ordinary day-to-day life.

Back to Cedric, I didn't quite get why DD made this statement as he discussed Cedric. Of course, he wasn't speaking about Cedric's decision in this case. Yet, in LV's world if a person can be killed just for being in the wrong place, then taking the easy way out won't protect you from harm. Doing the right thing might put you in danger, but not doing it won't protect you.





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Fri May  1 16:32:07 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 16:32:07 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <39B3AF8F.C0604D34@ibm.net>
Message-ID: <gtf867+cmef@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186396

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/957?threaded=1&l=1

Peg:
Another long-winded essay-post.

The Harry Potter books are, when you boil them down to their essence,
the unfolding of a
mystery, and what that mystery means to our main character. The seminal
scene which sets the
series in motion is that fatal night when James and Lily were killed
and, paradoxically, Harry
thwarted Voldemort. And the central engine of the series is our drive to
find out, slowly, book by book, what happened that night? What was that
all about? How and why? As we learn more, we, along with Harry,
discover other mysteries and secrets. Who is Sirius, and what is his
role in all this? What about Peter Pettigrew? Or Snape? As Harry
understands more and more (and we do, too, as his audience), Harry comes
to understand himself and his relation to others more clearly. When he
understands all in the 7th book, he will be fully an adult.

Alla:

So it is a very old post, the first one in our database of recommended posts pre OOP. Since it is about secrets, I thought it will be interesting to look at it almost nine years after in light of canon being complete and whether the observations still hold water, or not, etc. I am deliberately snipping very little or nothing at all, but you can go and reread the whole post if you wish to.
Do you agree or disagree that central drive of the series was to uncover what happened that night in GH? Do you think that the key of Harry's maturity was to know everything and to understand everything, or something different?

Because really especially in light of recent discussions, I think that the key to Harry's maturity was to understand that he does not need to know everything and some things are better taken on faith, etc. However, we did learn A LOT of secrets with Harry, so I do not know.


Peg:
Speaking metaphorically, discovering the truth is, for Harry, in a way,
the drawing of a map depicting his personal world and his relationship
to it. As he gets more information, the map becomes more accurate
until, presumably, in the 7th book, the map will be close enough to the
truth to carry him into adulthood. Put another way, as Harry slowly
pierces the layer of mystery and secrets surrounding himself, it's as if
he is chiseling away at the marble surrounding the statue of himself
buried in a stone. When all the veils are brushed away, he will see
himself, and his relation to the world, the way he truly is.

Alla:

I just want to say ? soooo beautifully written.

Now let's look at secrets, as handled by Our Team vs. the Other Team.

Peg:
Dumbledore, Harry's guide, seems to be teaching him that secrets are
best kept until they are
"ripe," but they must told when the time is right. Significantly, they
must be told by the person
who the secret belongs to. Examples: Dumbledore knows that Harry has
secrets, and encourages him to open up about them ("is there anything
you'd like to tell me, Harry? Anything at all?"), but doesn't force
Harry to tell before he is ready. When Harry inadvertently stumbles
upon Neville's secret, Dumbledore tells him to keep the secret until
Neville is ready to tell it himself.

Hermione does the same for Lupin, concealing that he is a werewolf,
reasoning that it is not her
secret to tell.

Dumbledore also keeps Snape's secret, and Lupin's secret. (Incidentally,
the fact that Dumbledore respects the integrity of Snape's secret,
whatever it is, is one of the most effective arguments to me that Snape
is Our Man Snape, truly allied with the powers of light, as surly as he
is.)

When events change, Dumbledore will prod people to disclose their
secrets because
circumstances make it necessary--but still, he will give them control by
allowing them to reveal
it themselves.  <SNIP>


 
Alla:

Eh, well I agree that Dumbledore keeps other people secrets, allowing them to reveal themselves when they feel time is right, I however (as known) rather disagree that Dumbledore has any idea when Harry is mature enough to handle them, and that his timing of not revealing so many things  **as related to Harry's need to know** was rather lousy IMO.

Peg:
Now let's look at the Other Team in contrast:

1) members of the Other Team reveal secrets before they are ripe, (and
not their own secrets,
either). They also betray secrets entrusted to them. Exhibit 1: Rita
Skeeter. Exhibit 2: Wormtail, betraying James and Lily to Voldemort.
Here you see how secrets and how they are handled (or betrayed) touches
upon issues of loyalty, which I wrote about in one of my previous
posts.

2) when revealing another person's secret, members of the Other Team
will put as negative an
interpretation on it as possible. Again, Rita Skeeter is a good example,
putting as much
insinuation as possible into her stories about Hagrid, Hermione and
Harry. Draco Malfoy is another, who usually worms out what Harry would
like to have remain private and puts as embarrassing an interpretation
on it as possible (e.g., the faintness Harry feels around dementors). <SNIP>

Alla:

Sure, Rita shows it in book seven too, I agree ? as negative interpretation as possible. I do think by the way, that  her job IS to reveal the secrets, as any journalist and if all she did was writing the truth, I would say that no matter how much people get angry at her, it is her job. But she does not just write the truth, no?

Peg:
3) conversely, the Other Team keeps secrets PAST the point that they
should be revealed. Barty Crouch, Sr. is an example, as are the Death
eaters, hiding their loyalty to Voldemort. Winky and Dobby, too, while
under the Other team's influence, make the mistake of keeping secrets
that should be told, out of a kind of mistaken loyalty.


4) secrets are used to plot, to trick, to trap, to wriggle out of
consequences for one's own
behavior. Examples: Barty Crouch, Jr., Wormtail, Voldemort, Lucius
Malfoy. (H, R and Hr offer a contrasting example: they keep the secret
about Hagrid keeping an illegal dragon. But when caught coming down
from the tower, they do not lie. They simply accept their punishment
stoically. Malfoy, I think, would have lied.)

Alla:

I think Dumbledore used soooo many secrets to plot and trap. 



Peg:
<SNIP>
Afterthought, related: It has been commented by many critics of the
series that Harry is a bad
example, evil, etc., because he lies. That's probably a whole other
post, but I'll just say that Harry's moral education is being
demonstrated by the way he is learning about how to handle secrets and
how to trust. He has come from a situation (in the Dursley household)
where he couldn't share anything about himself. Now, he is beginning to
trust and to build true, strong relationships, with teachers
(Dumbledore) parent figures (Sirius and Mr. and Mrs. Weasley) and
friends. He has to figure out as he goes how much to reveal and how much
to keep to himself in all of these relationships, and he finds figuring
out the balancing line rather confusing. See, for example, in the GoF
the interesting bit about his uncertainty about whether he should have
revealed to Sirius that his scar was hurting. He struggles to figure out
who he should entrust with this secret. When he hits upon Sirius as the
best person to confide in, he is relieved--but then he becomes angry at
himself and tries to "take the secret back" (my scar really didn't hurt)
when Sirius takes Harry's news seriously and reacts as a parent would,
by coming north. Learning how to handle secrets properly is a long,
complicated learning process, and a very important part of growing up.

Alla:

Love.





From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Fri May  1 16:54:13 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 16:54:13 -0000
Subject: Right vs. Easy (Ron WAS: Re: DH reread CH 4-5)
In-Reply-To: <gte6ed+aug@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtf9fl+593q@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186397

> Montavilla47:
> > That's such an ironic speech.  Because Cedric is one of the characters
> > we actually see make a *right* choice in the temptation of taking the
> > easy way out.  
> > 
> > At the end of the tournament, both Harry and Cedric are in sight of
> > the Cup, but Harry has a leg injury and Cedric does not.  He could
> > easily take the Cup and become the Champion of Hogwarts, but 
> > he doesn't, because, according to his code of honor, it wouldn't be
> > right.  
> > 
> > So, he and Harry agree to take the Cup together--a decision that
> > leads to Cedric's death.
> > 
> > So, when we do get to see someone make the clear choice of
> > "right" over "easy," he dies five minutes later.
> 
> Geoff:
> There is a double irony here because Harry could have taken 
> the "easy" way, acceeded to Cedric's urging to go ahead and 
> take the Cup.
> 
> Instead, he opts for the "right" way which is to coax Cedric into
> joining him.


Magpie:
Heh. The whole's book's kind of hilarious on that score. You have a contest that's judged in a way that's guaranteed to be biased. There's tons of cheating throughout, punctuated by odd pockets of fairplay, usually between the two Gryffindors for each other, making it less about strictly fair play and more about striking the right balance between feeling like you've honestly won your own bragging rights and not being the one sucker left behind when everbody else is doing it. The last moment of fair play winds up sending both Gryffindors to the graveyard. 

I can't remember if Harry's being in first place--which he is partly due to outside help that's sometimes outside the rules of the game (and at least once thanks to Dumbledore making sure Harry's rewarded for his self-sacrifice instead of letting it stay a self-sacrifice)--puts him in a better position in the maze to begin with.

But it's hard to really draw direct correlations since the contest doesn't really follow logical rules. Outside of having crowds watch things they can't see, it seems like one could have wound up touching the cup without being the winner. And in the center of everything we've got Voldemort's plan which is based around a contradiction: He wants Harry to be the one who gets the Portkey, then makes the Portkey the winning cup in a contest Harry oughten to have been able to win. Iow, he makes this nice, tempting Portkey for Harry to touch, then arranges for all manner of vicious beasts and bigger kids to stand between them.

-m




From k12listmomma at comcast.net  Fri May  1 18:18:51 2009
From: k12listmomma at comcast.net (k12listmomma)
Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 12:18:51 -0600
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
References: <gtf867+cmef@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <D70431866FDE4BD7AD31B6BDB9559001@homemain>

No: HPFGUIDX 186398

Alla:

Do you agree or disagree that central drive of the series was to uncover 
what happened that night in GH? Do you think that the key of Harry's 
maturity was to know everything and to understand everything, or something 
different?

Because really especially in light of recent discussions, I think that the 
key to Harry's maturity was to understand that he does not need to know 
everything and some things are better taken on faith, etc. However, we did 
learn A LOT of secrets with Harry, so I do not know.

Shelley:
I think it is the first- it's not necessarily the KEY to his maturity, but 
certainly Harry had to know and understand what had happened "to him" or 
about him so that he could understand his purpose in life- to be the one to 
end Voldemort, and so yes, that mission was part of his maturity. But to 
know and understand everything of the motives and actions of "others" 
(namely Dumbledore and Snape), I think part of Harry's maturity is to accept 
that he doesn't know, and doesn't always need to know, all the juicy details 
of the lives of others.

Snape's revelations, in fact, I found to be more of Rowling appeasing to the 
fan base who were demanding that Rowling explain who Snape was, when in 
reality, Harry wouldn't have found out the facts of his childhood (abused 
child, witness his teenage father torturing a teenage Snape) and Harry 
wouldn't have been privileged to know Snape's pure memories of promising to 
guard Harry after being so in love with his mother, making a deal with 
Dumbledore and the reason why he became a double agent to put his life at 
risk in the hands of Voldemort. Because of these revelations, Harry matures 
a lot, but the reasons/purpose for these revelations were not to mature a 
Harry as much as tell a story to the readers who we demanding to know the 
Snape-story.

With Dumbledore's past, we find Harry angry that Dumbledore didn't share his 
past with Harry, but really, that part of Harry is being (unreasonably) 
selfish. Being who Dumbledore was- headmaster and very busy- he didn't have 
time as a retired grandpa to sit with the youngsters and spin tales of days 
gone past, and so it's unreasonable of Harry to think that Dumbledore even 
had to the time to explain all of his youth to Harry, let alone have the 
need to. Part of Harry's maturity in that situation is just to accept that 
he didn't need to have all the explanations of who Dumbledore was to just 
trust him, like the others did in the Order of the Phoenix. Part of his 
maturing was to understand that he was meddling in someone's private life to 
seek all those answers, and to accept that if that person wants to share 
their failures and early life, that's their priority and right to keep that 
to themselves.

Real kids grow up not knowing or understanding the motives of the adults 
around them who make decisions for them, and in this respect, the whole 
series of Harry Potter is unrealistic. I think it might have been more 
intriguing to have Harry not know the Snape-story, and grow up and mature 
anyway, and then do a side story of Snape and his motives from his angle, so 
that the two remain separate and we get the full picture (or more of it) as 
two separate journeys. Instead, Rowling pulls a convenient trick of Snape 
not-dead-yet, and Harry confidently-there-at-the-right-time to have Snape 
pull out his memories to give to Harry, and I found that to be unrealistic. 
Snape had no reason to give Harry any memories- as a selfish git he was 
portrayed all his life, I would have expected him not to. Snape was never 
one to share his life- I didn't expect him to start the moment he was going 
to die. Again, I think it was for the sake of the readers the Rowling has 
Snape pull a very unusual stunt for him- to tell Harry of his personal 
motives. Harry would have matured anyway without knowing. I think I would 
have respected Harry a lot more if he forgave Snape out of the pure motive 
of that forgiveness is the right thing to do, rather than to have Harry 
forgive Snape simply because he didn't know all the rest of the story 
before, and that he had been wrong about Snape. I think I would have liked 
the story better if we had Harry mature, forgive Snape, and then have a 
delay "will" of Snape be delivered to Harry in the form of Snape's memories 
so that Harry comes to understand that his forgiveness really did match up 
with what he should have done.

But, for the record, I think Harry is wrong to forgive Snape, or rather, if 
I were in Harry's shoes, I wouldn't have forgiven Snape to the degree that 
Harry does. For me, I may have understood Snape's motives, but that in no 
way would have made me see him the way that Harry does, to forgive him so 
completely that he rewrites all of what Snape does as a "hero" and have 
admiration to the degree of naming my child after this loser, and to seek to 
repaint his picture for the rest of the WW that he was really a double-spy 
working for Dumbledore. I just can't see myself doing any of those things 
that Harry did, but this is Rowling's story she's telling and not mine. 




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Fri May  1 18:41:17 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 18:41:17 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <D70431866FDE4BD7AD31B6BDB9559001@homemain>
Message-ID: <gtffod+befe@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186399

Shelley:
I think it is the first- it's not necessarily the KEY to his maturity, but
certainly Harry had to know and understand what had happened "to him" or
about him so that he could understand his purpose in life- to be the one to
end Voldemort, and so yes, that mission was part of his maturity. But to
know and understand everything of the motives and actions of "others"
(namely Dumbledore and Snape), I think part of Harry's maturity is to accept
that he doesn't know, and doesn't always need to know, all the juicy details
of the lives of others. <SNIP>

Alla:

Right, I just think it is interesting how the switch from desire to know to faith (IMO) comes in Harry's character. Personally I found it sort of cool.

Shelley:
<SNIP>
I think I would
have respected Harry a lot more if he forgave Snape out of the pure motive
of that forgiveness is the right thing to do, rather than to have Harry
forgive Snape simply because he didn't know all the rest of the story
before, and that he had been wrong about Snape. I think I would have liked
the story better if we had Harry mature, forgive Snape, and then have a
delay "will" of Snape be delivered to Harry in the form of Snape's memories
so that Harry comes to understand that his forgiveness really did match up
with what he should have done.

But, for the record, I think Harry is wrong to forgive Snape, or rather, if
I were in Harry's shoes, I wouldn't have forgiven Snape to the degree that
Harry does. For me, I may have understood Snape's motives, but that in no
way would have made me see him the way that Harry does, to forgive him so
completely that he rewrites all of what Snape does as a "hero" and have
admiration to the degree of naming my child after this loser, and to seek to
repaint his picture for the rest of the WW that he was really a double-spy
working for Dumbledore. I just can't see myself doing any of those things
that Harry did, but this is Rowling's story she's telling and not mine.

Alla:

Ah, but while I agree with both paragraphs that you wrote here, I think it all makes sense to me, in a way I think JKR may think the same way. Let me try to clarify, yes of course in the general moral sense forgiveness is worth more when it comes just because, not for any particular reason.

But MAYBE, maybe because she also thinks that it is wrong to forgive Snape without knowing his motives, maybe that is why she did it that way?

Does it make sense to you? What I am trying to say is that of course I would not have ever forgiven Snape to the degree Harry does or at all, but it felt to me that the way Snape treated Harry was not ever mentioned as something he forgives him for and only his war deeds were mentioned and he was forgiven as a war hero and not  Harry's teacher?

However, yes, Harry naming his child after Snape
 oy,oy, oy. I mean, in light of me seeing Harry as Christ figure (as the term of literary criticism) I find it okay and do not start laughing loudly, but if Harry was not shown (to me) as such, I would have.

JMO,

Alla




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Fri May  1 19:08:24 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 19:08:24 -0000
Subject: Right vs. Easy (Ron WAS: Re: DH reread CH 4-5)
In-Reply-To: <gte6ed+aug@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtfhb8+tc37@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186400

Montavilla47 wrote:
> > That's such an ironic speech.  Because Cedric is one of the characters we actually see make a *right* choice in the temptation of taking the easy way out.  
> > 
> > At the end of the tournament, both Harry and Cedric are in sight of the Cup, but Harry has a leg injury and Cedric does not.  He could easily take the Cup and become the Champion of Hogwarts, but he doesn't, because, according to his code of honor, it wouldn't be right.  
> > 
> > So, he and Harry agree to take the Cup together--a decision that leads to Cedric's death.
> > 
> > So, when we do get to see someone make the clear choice of "right" over "easy," he dies five minutes later.
> 
> Geoff:
> There is a double irony here because Harry could have taken the "easy" way, acceeded to Cedric's urging to go ahead and take the Cup.
> 
> Instead, he opts for the "right" way which is to coax Cedric into joining him.

Carol responds:
Exactly. The right choice isn't right because you'll be rewarded for doing the right thing. It's right, in this case, because it's honorable to share what they think will be the glory of the victory. It would have been wrong for Cedric to take the cup because he could and Harry couldn't, and wrong for Harry to deprive Cedric and Hufflepuff of their chance for glory. Now, granted, this is a schoolboy code of honor, but it has its merits. Both are doing what they perceive as the right thing. Moreover, if Cedric had taken the cup alone, he would have been killed in any case, and if Harry had acquiesced in Cedric's wishes and gone alone, he would still have been tortured and nearly killed, an outcome that Cedric would probably perceive as his fault, just as Harry perceives it as partly his fault that Cedric was killed. There is, IMO, nor real right choice in this instance, only the choice that both boys perceive as right--and which would, indeed, have been the right choice had the cup not been a portkey taking them to Voldemort. (Yet again, the characters' choices have unintended consequences, with good intentions leading to unanticipated evil consequences, rather like Harry's sparing of Wormtail's life, which also has unintended consequences here.)

Right vs. easy is not about consequences, intended or otherwise, or about being rewarded for right choices and punished for "easy" ones. When Harry takes the easy way out, such as cheating on his homework, he usually gets away with it. When he does the right thing, or what he perceives as the right thing (such as going to the MoM to rescue Sirius Black), unintended bad consequences often follow. But the opposite is also true. Voldemort's attempt to kill the child Harry results in his being vaporized. His attempt to strengthen himself with Harry's blood so that he can share Lily's love magic ends up saving Harry rather than himself. And yet, regardless of consequences, right is still right and wrong or evil (a choice that Dumbledore interestingly does not present to his students) is still wrong or evil.

I suppose the moral in this is that the reason for doing the right thing (which is often also a hard thing) is not to be rewarded or even to feel good about having done the right thing. It's that we should do the right thing regardless of consequences. And the right thing, apparently, is to be honorable (like Cedric), (to show mercy (like Harry with Wormtail), to forgive (like Harry with Ron and Snape and Dumbledore), and yet to show courage and fight against evil (like just about all the good characters). Since evil, too, as unintended consequences, you just have to keep on trying to do the right thing, hoping that evil will stab itself in the foot.

As for taking the easy way out in small things, which in the WW appears to have no consequences either intended or unintended, I don't see any moral lesson for the characters or the readers, who are left to draw their own conclusions. (In real life, cheating often does have consequences: plagiarism can get you expelled and cheating on your income tax can land you in prison. But breaking the rules or the law doesn't seem to mean much in JKR's world. Even McGonagall (and apparently Molly) ends up casting an Unforgiveable Curse. Morally right and legally right are clearly not the same in JKR's view. And yet Harry ends up, if we accept interviews as canon, as the head of Magical Law Enforcement. What does it all mean? How can we fit it all together?

Carol, who does believe in doing the right thing regardless of consequences







From danjerri at madisoncounty.net  Fri May  1 19:44:30 2009
From: danjerri at madisoncounty.net (Jerri&Dan Chase)
Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 14:44:30 -0500
Subject: Right vs. Easy (Ron WAS: Re: DH reread CH 4-5)
In-Reply-To: <1241171128.558.56833.m5@yahoogroups.com>
References: <1241171128.558.56833.m5@yahoogroups.com>
Message-ID: <98AB37298EDD4C6597B789B26F30A0C0@JerriPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186401


Montavilla47 said:
> So, he and Harry agree to take the Cup together--a decision that
> leads to Cedric's death.
>
> So, when we do get to see someone make the clear choice of
> "right" over "easy," he dies five minutes later.

And Geoff replied:
>There is a double irony here because Harry could have taken
>the "easy" way, acceded to Cedric's urging to go ahead and
>take the Cup.
>
>Instead, he opts for the "right" way which is to coax Cedric into
>joining him.

I can still remember when reading GoF how hard this point hit me.  This 
death hurt me more than any others in the first 6 books.

There wasn't a mistake made, neither Harry nor Cedric did anything bad or 
selfish or foolish.  They were in a contest, and were racing to get the 
prize winning Cup.  Neither could have realized that the Cup was a trap. 
They both did good, unselfish things, Harry helping Cedric from Impero/Crum 
and warning Cedric about the Spider and Cedric helping Harry when the Spider 
had him, as well as earlier in the contest Harry warning Cedric about the 
dragons and Cedric advising Harry to "take a bath."

So, they both did what was "right" and both got punished for it.

Cedric's punishment was the very final one of death.

Harry's punishment was seeing Cedric die, knowing that if he (Harry) had 
done something different (take the cup alone) that Cedric would have been 
alive.  Then he had the experience of watching Lord V return and knowing 
that he had provided one of the ingredients (blood) that Lord V wanted.  The 
fact that Harry managed to escape with his life didn't make the experience 
anything but painful for Harry.  I didn't wonder that Harry had nightmares 
about it at least all summer long, and that by the time he and Dudley met 
the dementors at the beginning of OoP that Harry's worst memory had changed 
from his parents death to the events of the graveyard.

Now, JKR ended up showing us by the end of DH that this was one of the many 
needed steps to lead to Harry's defeat of Lord V.  But Harry couldn't know 
that at the time.

Therefore, I admit wondering about JKR/Dumbledore's statement about 
remembering Cedric when one had to choose between doing what was easy and 
what was right.  Could it have been meaning that one never knows which path 
is more dangerous?  If Cedric had taken the easy path and taken the cup 
alone, would Baby Mort have used him instead of Harry, and then killed him, 
or killed him at once and tried again to get Harry?  If Harry had taken the 
easy path and taken the cup himself, would it have changed the events in the 
graveyard, other than not having Cedric killed?  I suppose that DD would 
have known earlier that the Cup had been a portkey and taken Harry somewhere 
as Cedric would have reported it?  We never really learn what happened at 
Hogwarts during that very long time between when the Cup was taken and Harry 
returned with Cedric's body.  Did anyone realize that the boys weren't still 
in the maze?

Jerri





From gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk  Fri May  1 20:41:12 2009
From: gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk (Geoff Bannister)
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 20:41:12 -0000
Subject: MAGICkal elITE
In-Reply-To: <gtd6dl+d2i1@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtfmp8+3732@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186402

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> Geoff wrote:
> > Looking at the choices which we have been considering in this thread, 
> > on several occasions I have said that I regard Harry as an everyman (with 
> > a small "e"). <snip>
> > 
> > If I may misquote Shakespeare, "Some are born heroes, some achieve  
> > heroism and some have heroism thrust upon them".
> > 
> > Harry, I believe, fits into the last category. He sees himself as a very 
> > ordinary person:
> > `"Hagrid," he said quietly, "I think you must have made a mistake. 
> > I don't think I can be a wizard."'
> 
> > He feels uncomfortable when he is thrown into the limelight:
> > <snip>
> 
> Carol responds:
> 
> I understand your interpretation and in some respects I agree with it.

Geoff: 
I consider Harry as an everyman because I cannot see him as Christ as 
some people do. Although I started this post because I was perturbed 
by Kemper's suggestion about aliens and Superheros. I only hope that 
he wrote that with a po-face and tongue-in-cheek.

I dislike aliens (in this context) and Superheros: X-men or Superman 
or similar; the one I dislike most is the insufferable, immortal and 
apparently omnipotent Q in Star Trek. I dislike them because I always 
find stories where a Superhero acts as a deus ex machina totally 
unsatisfying.

So I seek an everyman with whom I can identify. As I said earlier, 
everyone has the innate ability to be a hero (small 'h') if events demand
it. 

<snip>

Carol:
> But wanting to be Just Harry and being Just Harry are two different things. I agree that in many respects, he's just an ordinary wizard kid. He wears glasses and has unruly hair that not even magic can tame. At least in the first four books, he's small and skinny (like Snape as a child). He suffers unfairness and bullying in varying degrees from a variety of characters. He likes to have fun; he breaks the rules; he cheats on his homework; he has problems dealing with girls. His grades in most subjects are above average rather than exceptional, in part because he lets his mind wander in class. So far, setting aside the fact that he's a wizard, he's a kid that any reader can identify with in one respect or another. This is the Harry that we would have seen, probably, had Voldemort not come to power, killed his parents, and given him that scar.

<Snip>

> It's useful, I think, to contrast him with Neville, who can be viewed as a foil to Harry (that is, a character is a similar situation who can be compared and contrasted with another character). Neville, too, might have been the Boy Who Lived (assuming that his mother had for some reason been given a chance to live). And Neville, too, lost his parents to Voldemort even though they're technically still alive. But Neville, with neither fame nor scar nor special destiny, is unquestionably an everyman. Though he has a talent for Herbology, he has no extraordinary powers (from a Wizarding perspective). His own family worries that he may be a Squib. He does not even recognize his own remarkable courage, which is overshadowed by his self-doubts.
 
Geoff:
You have drawn our attention to Neville; this had also occurred to me. 
I'm not saying that we should not have our own strengths and talents.
As you rightly point out, Harry has his Quidditch. I am hopeless at sports 
but I had the ability to be a successful Maths teacher. I am not arguing 
that we all have to be dunderheads but that events can shape what we do 
and make use of what we may consider to be only ordinary skills.

Carol:
> But in Harry's absence, in the face of danger, Neville emerges as a leader, resourceful and courageous. I was thinking when I read your paraphrase of Shakespeare, that Neville, like Harry, had heroism thrust upon him, but now I think that Neville achieved heroism. He only needed the opportunity to reveal who he was all along. And that, I think, is true of all the everyday heroes that we hear about in real life.

> Harry, in contrast, had heroism thrust upon him. He had choices, certainly, but running away and saving himself as Aberforth suggested was never one of them.
> 
> Harry as Everyman (everyman)? Yes and no, I think. Certainly, he has elements of ordinariness that help the reader to empathize or identify with him on some level. It's also true, as Snape says, that he's helped by luck and by more gifted friends. 

<snip>

>There's no question that he's had heroism (and greatness, if we keep the original wording of the quotation) thrust upon him. But does that make him an everyman like Neville (and Ron and many other characters in the books)? Or does it make him something else (a Christ figure or epic hero or superhero)?

Geoff:
To me, 'yes' to the first and 'no' to the second. If you look at the background 
of many famous people, some of whom you might consider as heroes, many 
of them have been thrust into positions of which they never dreamed. We 
ourselves have probably done things and gone along paths which we never 
even imagined in our early life. 

I believe that you can be an everyman and a hero. How do I see a hero? Not  
one who springs from the womb fully formed wearing a blue jumper with 
a scarlet S emblazoned on it. Not one who puts an advert in the local paper 
"Hero for hire". But an ordinary person suddenly faced with an extraordinary 
situation.

The examples of being a "local hero" which I quoted before are not 
announced in advance. Going back to my misquote, having heroism thrust 
upon you implies that you don't have time to go and brush your teeth and 
think about the meaning of life. To take Lady Macbeth out of context it's a 
case of "Stand not upon the order of your going but go at once."




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Fri May  1 21:01:09 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 21:01:09 -0000
Subject: Right vs. Easy (Ron WAS: Re: DH reread CH 4-5)
In-Reply-To: <98AB37298EDD4C6597B789B26F30A0C0@JerriPC>
Message-ID: <gtfnul+jbac@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186403

Jerri:
> 
> So, they both did what was "right" and both got punished for it.
> 
> Cedric's punishment was the very final one of death.
> 
<snip>
> Now, JKR ended up showing us by the end of DH that [Harry's punishment]  was one of the many  needed steps to lead to Harry's defeat of Lord V.  But Harry couldn't know  that at the time.
> 
> Therefore, I admit wondering about JKR/Dumbledore's statement about 
> remembering Cedric when one had to choose between doing what was easy and  what was right. Could it have been meaning that one never knows which path  is more dangerous?  

Pippin:
Dumbledore wasn't telling the students to remember Cedric so they'll  survive. They already know that if they want to survive, the best option will be joining Voldemort. Dumbledore was telling them to remember Cedric  and keep their honor.

Pippin




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Sat May  2 15:03:55 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Sat, 02 May 2009 15:03:55 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <D70431866FDE4BD7AD31B6BDB9559001@homemain>
Message-ID: <gthncr+5hsg@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186404

Shelley: 
> Snape had no reason to give Harry any memories- as a selfish git he was  portrayed all his life, I would have expected him not to. Snape was never  one to share his life- I didn't expect him to start the moment he was going  to die.

Pippin:

I think Snape's motive is given in his memories: he wanted  to make it as clear to Harry as he had to Dumbledore that he hadn't done any of it for Harry's sake. He knew he would be dead by the time Harry got a chance to view the memories, so he didn't have to fear being embarrassed  anymore, and he believed that Harry would soon be dead himself. I'm sure he never expected Harry would have a chance to clear his name or anything like that, so that was, IMO, something Harry did solely because it was the right thing.

I think Snape's life among many other experiences showed Harry how  pointless it was to carry a grudge. James, Lupin and Sirius were happy in their next life, utterly untouched by all the years of hate that Snape wasted on them. The only person left to suffer by it was the innocent Harry. I don't think Harry would want to repeat that mistake.

Pippin 





 Again, I think it was for the sake of the readers the Rowling has 
> Snape pull a very unusual stunt for him- to tell Harry of his personal 
> motives. Harry would have matured anyway without knowing. I think I would 
> have respected Harry a lot more if he forgave Snape out of the pure motive 
> of that forgiveness is the right thing to do, rather than to have Harry 
> forgive Snape simply because he didn't know all the rest of the story 
> before, and that he had been wrong about Snape. I think I would have liked 
> the story better if we had Harry mature, forgive Snape, and then have a 
> delay "will" of Snape be delivered to Harry in the form of Snape's memories 
> so that Harry comes to understand that his forgiveness really did match up 
> with what he should have done.
> 
> But, for the record, I think Harry is wrong to forgive Snape, or rather, if 
> I were in Harry's shoes, I wouldn't have forgiven Snape to the degree that 
> Harry does. For me, I may have understood Snape's motives, but that in no 
> way would have made me see him the way that Harry does, to forgive him so 
> completely that he rewrites all of what Snape does as a "hero" and have 
> admiration to the degree of naming my child after this loser, and to seek to 
> repaint his picture for the rest of the WW that he was really a double-spy 
> working for Dumbledore. I just can't see myself doing any of those things 
> that Harry did, but this is Rowling's story she's telling and not mine.
>





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sat May  2 17:45:51 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sat, 02 May 2009 17:45:51 -0000
Subject: DH  reread CH 9-11
Message-ID: <gti0sf+reuo@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186405

"
 all he could feel was Hermione's hand as he was squeezed through space and time, away from the Burrow, away from the descending Death Eaters, away, perhaps from Voldemort himself"  - p.134

Alla:

Away from Voldemort himself 
. Ah Harry.


"Never mind what they're called!" said Hermione a little hysterically. "How did they find us? What are we going to do?"
Somehow her panic seemed to clear Harry's head" ? p.139

Alla:

So I guess Hermione's panic is still supposed to be her only flaw?

"Harry, I know you really want to go to Godric's  Hollow, but I'm scared
 I am scared at how easily those Death Eaters found us yesterday. It just makes me feel more than ever that we ought to avoid the place where your parents are buried, I'm sure they'd be expecting you to visit it." ? p.153

Alla:

Yeah she is definitely not bursting with confidence, huh?


" I know ? but how did you escape the Inferi?"
Kreacher did not seem to understand.
"Master Regulus told Kreacher to come back," he repeated.
*****
"The house-elf's highest law is his master's bidding," intoned Kreacher. "Kreacher was told to come home, so Kreacher came home" ? p.161

Alla:

It is official, lol, Kreacher is more powerful than Voldemort. Seriously, sometimes I wonder is there something house elves cannot do.


`Wizarding wills are examined by the Ministry, remember? They'll know Sirius left  you your place" ? p.166

Alla ? Wait, what? Ministry examined Dumbledore's will, but do we know that they read every single wizarding will? Oh dear, wizarding law seems more and more interesting in a bad way.

"Right, we've got a few questions for you," Harry told Mundungus, who shouted at once: "I panicked, OK? I never wanted to come along, no offence, mate, but I never volunteered to die for you, an' that was bleeding' You-Know-Who come flying at me, anyone woulda got outta there, I said all along I didn't wanna do it-" p.181

Alla:

Oh Mundungus, I do not like you at all, but I sympathize. No fun being used and abused and forced into risking your life, huh? I think you are stupid in that you do not realize that you can run from Voldemort and save yourself, but I certainly think that if you do not want to fight, it should be your own choice.

But hey, at least you have not been manipulated into fighting by playing on your guilt over the death of the woman you loved, OR you had not been manipulated into return to Hogwarts by using the son of the same woman who was your favorite student.







From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Sat May  2 20:59:40 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Sat, 02 May 2009 20:59:40 -0000
Subject: Snape's test
In-Reply-To: <gtd14l+l9m9@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtic7s+3kvu@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186406

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> Carol earlier:
> <snip> So, for my own satisfaction and with no intent to persuade her or anyone else on the list, I want to explain why I consider Snape's plan a "test."
> 
> Carol again:
> Sorry about my wording here. It sounds as if I don't want responses! Actually, I'm quite curious as to what other people think (assume that they're not tired of the topic). <snip>
> 
> > Whether Harry would have passed this test--and surely it *is* a test of his worthiness as a "true Gryffindor" or Harry would not have gone over the qualities of a Gryffindor in his head--is unclear because he doesn't get the chance. The Horcrux, sensing the presence of the sword, tries to kill him.
> > 
> > What *is* clear, at least to me, is that Ron *does* pass the test. Not only does he dive in, as Harry did, he saves Harry's life, demonstrating not only "daring" and "nerve" but "valor" and "chivalry" and a greater "need" than Harry's. And, of course, he successfully retrieves the sword. <snip>
>  
> > To return to Snape. Dumbledore has told him that "the Sword must be taken under conditions of need and valor." He cannot, of course, simply hand it to Harry since he can't be seen, but he can't just leave it on the ground, either. (Harry himself recognizes that it can't be that easy; he has to earn the sword.) So Snape must make a plan that involves taking the sword under "conditions of need and valor." He must, that is, make retrieving the sword as difficult and dangerous as possible so that Harry must demonstrate "valor" in order to retrieve it.
> > 
> > Snape, who knows quite well what the qualities of a Gryffindor are surely understands that he's setting up a test of Harry's worthiness as a "true Gryffindor." But whether he know so or not, that's exactly what his plan entails. (Harry knows it, as his thoughts reveal.) And the test, through no intention of Snape's, becomes even more difficult when the Horcrux starts to choke Harry. He can no longer pass the test himself, but Ron can and does. <snip>
> 
> Carol again:
> I need to make clear that I'm not using "test" in the sense of an exam that Snape will grade to determine whether Harry passes or not. I'm using "test" in relation to what's known in literary criticism as the "test motif"--most if not all heroes in the heroic epic and similar genres must pass a test of worth or valor, whether it's Sir Gawain rejecting temptation by the Green Knight's beautiful wife or the boy Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, proving that he's the rightful king (though he doesn't know it). Galadriel uses the word "test" in this sense when she says after rejecting the temptation to wield the One Ring, "I pass the test. I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel."
> 
> Harry, of course, passes some sort of test (in this sense) in every book, whether it's looking into the Mirror of Erised and seeing the Philosopher's Stone but not wanting it for himself or being possessed by Voldemort and driving him out through love. Knowing that he must face Voldemort unarmed rather than fighting him is another test which Harry, of course, passes with flying colors.
> 
> With regard to "Snape's test," by which I mean his placing the sword in the icy pool so that Harry can retrieve it "under conditions of need and valor," it doesn't matter whether Snape is consciously setting up a test of Harry's worthiness to wield the Sword of Gryffindor. It's the sword itself that judges the Gryffindor's worthiness. (Interestingly, we don't know what would happen if someone other than a "worthy Gryffindor" attempted to wield it. Would the sword just vanish?) What matters, in terms of the motif, is that Harry's valor be tested by the conditions that Snape sets up regardless of whether Snape is consciously setting up a test or merely following Dumbledore's instructions. 
> 
> Again, the test motif is a literary convention common in heroic literature and, like the Christ figure and Everyman interpretations we've been discussing in other threads, a valid way of looking at a literary work, heroic epic being one of several genres that JKR is working in (the same one that requires the death of the old mentor).
> 
> Carol, with apologies for sounding like the English teacher she used to be
>
Montavilla47:

I guess for the book's purposes, it doesn't matter whether the test is 
set up or not, but somehow it feels wrong.  I'm not sure why that
is.  It's not like there weren't lots of people who set up tests for 
King Arthur or the Knights to pass.  But it seems like, in order for
a magical object to do its magic, the "need and valor" shouldn't be
artificial.  

I mean, Harry already needs the dang sword.  He's got a Horcrux he
needs to destroy.  And, in terms of valor, if trying to kill the most
powerful evil wizard in the world isn't enough, why should jumping
into an icy pond qualify?  

I'm not knocking Snape here.  But, somehow I do think that Ron 
does pass a genuine test, while Harry's task is more like doing a
school assignment.

Maybe it's because it seems like Ron's jumping in save Harry is 
the only action he could have taken to save Harry, while Harry's
jumping into the pond was more foolhardy than heroic?  I'm not 
really sure.  But, when Portrait!Dumbledore was telling Snape
to go set up a test, it seemed like something that shouldn't 
possibly work.

This is, of course, a world where the Headmaster sets up 
a magical obstacle course for eleven-year-old children.  But 
in that situation, Dumbledore wasn't counting on a magical
force to kick in just because the kids got through it.









From foxmoth at qnet.com  Sat May  2 21:15:31 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Sat, 02 May 2009 21:15:31 -0000
Subject: Snape's test
In-Reply-To: <gtic7s+3kvu@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtid5j+jghh@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186407

Montavilla:
> 
> I mean, Harry already needs the dang sword.  He's got a Horcrux he
> needs to destroy.  And, in terms of valor, if trying to kill the most powerful evil wizard in the world isn't enough, why should jumping into an icy pond qualify? 

Pippin:
Snape and Dumbledore don't know that Harry has found a horcrux, so they don't know that the "need" condition has been met.

Pippin





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sat May  2 22:42:34 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sat, 02 May 2009 22:42:34 -0000
Subject: Snape's test
In-Reply-To: <gtid5j+jghh@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtii8q+iq6i@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186408

Montavilla wrote:
> > 
> > I mean, Harry already needs the dang sword.  He's got a Horcrux he
> > needs to destroy.  And, in terms of valor, if trying to kill the most powerful evil wizard in the world isn't enough, why should jumping into an icy pond qualify? 
> 
Pippin responded:
> Snape and Dumbledore don't know that Harry has found a horcrux, so they don't know that the "need" condition has been met.
> 
> Pippin
>
Carol notes:
As far as I can tell, Dumbledore dies thinking that he and Harry have actually found a Horcrux (he never sees RAB's note), so Portrait!DD would think that HRH already have a Horcrux that they need to destroy. At any rate, he knows that Harry *will* need it to destroy the Horcruxes. Snape has asked DD why Harry needs the sword and Portrait!DD has refused to tell him. Nevertheless, Snape knows that Harry needs it for some reason and that it has something to do with defeating Voldemort. So maybe he does know that the need criterion has already been met--or thinks it has. At any rate, I don't see how he could have set up his test so that Harry needs the sword to defend himself, so he does the best he can to meet the conditions of need and valor so Harry can pass the test without seriously endangering Harry, and needing to destroy a Horcrux does seem to satisfy the "need" criterion for Dumbledore and Neville.

As for valor, as both Harry and Dumbledore recognize, Snape has to do something other than leave the sword on the ground for Harry to pick up, and the icy pond is really the best that Snape can do. It does at least require "daring" and "nerve" (from the Sorting Hat's song) if not "valor" to dive into the pool. Clearly, Portrait!DD wants Harry to *earn* the right to retrieve the sword. Wanting to kill the most powerful Wizard in the world would not, I think, qualify as "valor," which Harry could only show in actually confronting present danger. Even wizards can drown, as Harry knows, having nearly drowned after the gillyweed wore off in the Second Task, and icy water is even more dangerous.

Still, would the sword have recognized "daring" and "nerve" as "valor" and allowed Harry to use it because of his "need" to destroy the Horcrux? Would the test of need and valor as Snape set it up have been sufficient in itself? If Harry hadn't been wearing the Horcrux, would diving into the icy water have been sufficient? We don't know because the Horcrux prevents him from grabbing the sword and attempting to use it. All we know is that Ron unquestionably met both criteria, whether or not Snape saw him and intended him as well as Harry to follow the doe Patronus. (Certainly, Snape would have seen him jump in and would have reported to Portrait!DD that Harry was rescued and the sword retrieved.)

Speaking of tests, Harry expected to have to pass a test of magical ability to get into Hogwarts (something like pulling a rabbit out of a hat). And the Ravenclaws are tested on a much smaller scale every time they try to get into their common room. (Does McGonagall's ability to answer the riddle make her a "true Ravenclaw," Sorted too soon? ;-) )

Carol, who think that Harry's extraordinary luck also played a role






From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Sun May  3 01:23:43 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 01:23:43 -0000
Subject: DH  reread CH 9-11
In-Reply-To: <gti0sf+reuo@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtirmv+991f@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186409

> Alla:
> But hey, at least you have not been manipulated into fighting by playing on your guilt over the death of the woman you loved, OR you had not been manipulated into return to Hogwarts by using the son of the same woman who was your favorite student.

Zara:
Snape and Sluggy are big boys, they can make these sorts of decisions for themselves.

In Sluggy's case, I did not even get a vibe that it was sentiment that brought him to Hogwarts. He saw the opportunity that teaching the Chosen One presented, and it was also pointed out to him that Hogwarts might actually be a fairly safe place to be. Is pointing out previously overlooked advantages of a course of action even manipulation? Now, *Harry* did play on Sluggie's emotions to get that memory.<g> And Albus was dead when Slughorn decided to come back for a second year, and long dead when Sluggie decided it would be a fine idea to duel Voldemort himself.





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sun May  3 03:11:34 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 03:11:34 -0000
Subject: DH  reread CH 9-11
In-Reply-To: <gtirmv+991f@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtj216+48mq@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186410

> > Alla:
> > But hey, at least you have not been manipulated into fighting by playing on your guilt over the death of the woman you loved, OR you had not been manipulated into return to Hogwarts by using the son of the same woman who was your favorite student.
> 
> Zara:
> Snape and Sluggy are big boys, they can make these sorts of decisions for themselves.

Alla:

Well, yeah they could the question for me remain would have they made the same decision without one white bearded man manipulating them, IMO?

Zara: 
> In Sluggy's case, I did not even get a vibe that it was sentiment that brought him to Hogwarts. He saw the opportunity that teaching the Chosen One presented, and it was also pointed out to him that Hogwarts might actually be a fairly safe place to be. Is pointing out previously overlooked advantages of a course of action even manipulation? 

Alla:

Well, I guess we differ on this one. I felt Albus exploited Harry's green eyes and him being Lily's son to the full advantage, even if he was not talking much about it.

And actually, it is a good question, I mean if Albus truly wanted him to come and teach and to a relatively safe place, I guess I would still consider it manipulation, but  of more harmless variety.

But to me the only reason Albus wanted him to come was to make it easier for him to *take a stub* at getting a memory and then to let Harry loose at him. To me it is a masterful manipulation.

Zara:
Now, *Harry* did play on Sluggie's emotions to get that memory.<g>

Alla:

Well **of course** he did! Per Albus' persistent requests he did that. Albus taught Harry many things and I do not consider many of them to be a good things to learn.

Zara:
And Albus was dead when Slughorn decided to come back for a second year, and long dead when Sluggie decided it would be a fine idea to duel Voldemort himself.

Alla:

Ah yes, Sluggy turned out to be a braver and better person than Albus ever expected IMO.

Of course he made all those decisions without Albus, you are totally right. The thing is I do not really find it relevant to determine whether he was badly manipulated, just as I do not find a fact that Erlein  from "Tigana" saved Alessan and his gang's asses several times and took his cause. I still find what Alessan did to be unforgivable and while Albus did not enslave Sluggy against his will, I find what he did to be of the same variety, even if much milder one (Sluggy could refuse of course, but I think Albus knew damn well that he could not while looking at Lily's eyes, that it really was not a choice for Sluggy)

JMO,

Alla





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sun May  3 03:22:45 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 03:22:45 -0000
Subject: DH  reread CH 9-11
In-Reply-To: <gtj216+48mq@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtj2m5+82ou@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186411

Just wanted to add and did not in the previous post that I think while both Snape and Sluggie were badly manipulated, the most obvious example of manipulation here is Mundungus. After all we did not hear from Snape that he would not have become a spy had Albus not insisted, so there is a possibility that he would have been, I guess.

Sluggie does object and as I said, I think he was badly manipulated, however in theory he could have refused and I am not sure if Dumbledore would have forced him to come by force. I mean, I am sure he would have come up with another devious plan, but at least it would have taken some time.

Mundungus tells it as it is, he **did not want** to die for Harry. He was forced to do so anyway.

As I said, I much prefer the heroes to cowards, but not everybody in RL gets to be brave and no, I do not believe that those who are not should be forced into fighting against their will.

JMO,

Alla




From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Sun May  3 06:15:04 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 06:15:04 -0000
Subject: DH  reread CH 9-11
In-Reply-To: <gtj216+48mq@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtjcp8+1e41@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186412

> Zara: 
> > In Sluggy's case, I did not even get a vibe that it was sentiment that brought him to Hogwarts. He saw the opportunity that teaching the Chosen One presented, and it was also pointed out to him that Hogwarts might actually be a fairly safe place to be. Is pointing out previously overlooked advantages of a course of action even manipulation? 

> Alla:
> And actually, it is a good question, I mean if Albus truly wanted him to come and teach and to a relatively safe place, I guess I would still consider it manipulation, but  of more harmless variety.
> 
> But to me the only reason Albus wanted him to come was to make it easier for him to *take a stub* at getting a memory and then to let Harry loose at him. To me it is a masterful manipulation.

Zara:
This is certainly why Albus wanted him there, the memory. (Though, this is in my mind inextricably tied to Slughorn's well-being. If he was killed by Death Eaters before the memory was retrieved, a fate he apparently felt he had reason to fear, that would be an undesirable outcome for Albus).

But the advantages Albus offered to Slughorn were real. I mean, suppose someone offers me a good salary and working conditions and interesting job, and I accept. They do it, though, for some ulterior motive other than simply thinking I am well qualified for the post. Am I being manipulated? I'm getting exactly what I think I am getting, and it is advantageous.

And in Sluggie's case, he surely did know the ulterior motive. 




From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Sun May  3 07:30:23 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 07:30:23 -0000
Subject: MAGICkal elITE - The Boy, The Man, The Hero, the Saint.
In-Reply-To: <gtfmp8+3732@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtjh6f+k8o3@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186413

---  "Geoff Bannister" <gbannister10 at ...> wrote:
>
> ...
> 
> Geoff: 
> I consider Harry as an everyman because I cannot see him as 
> Christ as some people do. ...
> 
> So I seek an everyman with whom I can identify. As I said 
> earlier, everyone has the innate ability to be a hero (small
> 'h') if events demand it. 
> 
> <snip>
> 

bboyminn:

Geoff, I know you are an educated man, and also a man of faith.
But in this instance, and with no intended offense, I have to 
wonder if your faith isn't playing a role in your refusal to 
see Harry in the suggested role? 

First, I don't think anyone can remotely imply that Harry is
'Christ' in the story. But he could symbolically and 
metaphorically represent a Christ-like figure.

Keep in mind that the classic hero's story or hero's fable is
all about the hero dying and being reborn. Not literally reborn
but symbolically reborn, or reborn in a more practical but still
abstract sense.

And I think we see Harry's symbolic death and rebirth in every
story. The Harry we see at the beginning of the book is not the
Harry we see at the end of the book. He is older, wiser, and
more experience; more wiser and more experienced in ways that
his fellow students are not. 

Further we see Harry's selflessness and willingness to sacrifice
for the good of his friends, and for what he believes is the
right and noble thing to do. So, even here there is a symbolic
similarity.

Do I think Harry is Christ? No. But I do see aspects of him and
his story that are symbolically Christ-like. 

But, does that stop him from being everyman? No. Certainly not.
As you point out, most heroes are not heroes by choice, and 
even after being declared and acclaimed as heroes, they still 
deny it. Oddly, everyone wants to have a hero, but no body 
really want to be one. It is a very hard thing to live up to. 

So, very much Harry is 'everyman', and I think that is a huge
aspect of the appeal of the stories to people. It is very easy
to see yourself reflected in Harry. He is not some idealize 
'After School Special' version of a Hero. He is flawed, he has
troubles, he struggle with the common things that we all 
struggle with. He is an ordinary man who is not afraid to do
extraordinary things.

So, I think Harry is both. Clearly he is 'everyman'; the 
common denominator among us. But I also see Christ-like glints
reflected in the things he does and the choices he makes. I
hope and pray that we are all lucky enough that when the world
looks upon us, they also see those Christ-like glints in us. 
Yet, even with those reflections, none of us would feel 
comfortable being called Christ-like or, even more so, Christ.

So, I understand your resistance to seeing Harry in this light,
but you have to remember it is all very metaphorical. And to
further understand that virtually every "hero's story" is filled
this symbols that are reminiscent of Christ. But there is a
huge gap between 'reminiscent' and literal. 

Harry as 'everyman' and 'hero' are very clear, but to draw
Christ-like parallels, you need to dig pretty deep in to the
symbology and mythology of the story; pretty deep into the 
subtle and abstract aspects of the story. I think any one
who sees any deeper resemblance to Harry and Christ beyond the
subtle and symbolic, is adding a lot more to the story than
is actually there. 

Harry, in my view, is only Christ-like in the sense that nearly
every hero's story tells a Christ-like tale. 

Again, not intending to offend, nor to imply that I know your
mind better than you. Simply saying that what we call 'Christ-
like' from a literary sense, is very common in myth, fables,
and hero's tales, and that I see that subtle underlying symbology
in Harry story too. 

The boy, the man, the hero, the saint, they are not mutually
exclusive. 

Just a few random thoughts.

Steve/bboyminn 





From gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk  Sun May  3 11:50:48 2009
From: gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk (Geoff Bannister)
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 11:50:48 -0000
Subject: MAGICkal elITE - The Boy, The Man, The Hero, the Saint.
In-Reply-To: <gtjh6f+k8o3@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtk0eo+b0f6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186414

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Steve" <bboyminn at ...> wrote:
>
> ---  "Geoff Bannister" <gbannister10@> wrote:
  
Geoff: 
> > I consider Harry as an everyman because I cannot see him as 
> > Christ as some people do. ...
> > 
> > So I seek an everyman with whom I can identify. As I said 
> > earlier, everyone has the innate ability to be a hero (small
> > 'h') if events demand it. 
> > 
> > <snip>
 
bboyminn: 
> Geoff, I know you are an educated man, and also a man of faith.
> But in this instance, and with no intended offense, I have to 
> wonder if your faith isn't playing a role in your refusal to 
> see Harry in the suggested role? 
 
> First, I don't think anyone can remotely imply that Harry is
> 'Christ' in the story. But he could symbolically and 
> metaphorically represent a Christ-like figure.

Geoff:
Thank you kind sir for the compliments. Please allow me a 
moment while my blushes subside!

Actually, you are not offending me in the least because we
are in agreement! 

You are echoing what I have been saying for a week or so, 
namely that I cannot accept the idea of someone being a 
Christ figure, but they *can* be Christ-like. 

As I wrote, I find Kemper's position arguable in that he 
cannot accept either the Christ or Everyman poisitons and 
so postulates a third way - the "Harry is an alien" which 
seems (to me) decidedly strange.





From bruce_alan_wilson at verizon.net  Sun May  3 04:01:35 2009
From: bruce_alan_wilson at verizon.net (larryu81)
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 04:01:35 -0000
Subject: This link may be of interest.
Message-ID: <gtj4uv+m8m2@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186415

It touches on a great many ideas we have discussed on the list, and brings up points that I would have liked to have addressed but did not feel nearly clever enough to fully address:

http://hogwartsprofessor.com


BAW






From HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com  Sun May  3 16:58:11 2009
From: HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com (HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com)
Date: 3 May 2009 16:58:11 -0000
Subject: Weekly Chat, 5/3/2009, 1:00 pm 
Message-ID: <1241369891.10.77261.m3@yahoogroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186416

Reminder from: HPforGrownups Yahoo! Group
 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/cal

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From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Sun May  3 18:15:03 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 18:15:03 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gthncr+5hsg@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtkmv7+35vd@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186417

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
>
> Shelley: 
> > Snape had no reason to give Harry any memories- as a selfish git he was  portrayed all his life, I would have expected him not to. Snape was never  one to share his life- I didn't expect him to start the moment he was going  to die.
> 
> Pippin:
> 
> I think Snape's motive is given in his memories: he wanted  to make it as clear to Harry as he had to Dumbledore that he hadn't done any of it for Harry's sake. He knew he would be dead by the time Harry got a chance to view the memories, so he didn't have to fear being embarrassed  anymore, and he believed that Harry would soon be dead himself. I'm sure he never expected Harry would have a chance to clear his name or anything like that, so that was, IMO, something Harry did solely because it was the right thing.
> 
> I think Snape's life among many other experiences showed Harry how  pointless it was to carry a grudge. James, Lupin and Sirius were happy in their next life, utterly untouched by all the years of hate that Snape wasted on them. The only person left to suffer by it was the innocent Harry. I don't think Harry would want to repeat that mistake.
> 
> Pippin 
> 
Montavilla47:

May I offer an alternative interpretation?  We have only Dumbledore's and 
Lupin's word that Snape carried a grudge against James "all those years" 
because of  their school days/the Prank. In Dumbedore's case, we know he 
was lying, and in Lupin's case, he could easily be mistaken.

In PS/SS, Voldemort told Harry that Snape hated James, but didn't want 
Harry killed.  That's true enough, but we know that Voldemort was pretty
wrong about Snape's motivations.  So, we really can't trust his take on the
situation.

Dumbledore supports that theory with his information that Snape hated
James for saving his life, telling Harry that Snape was protecting him in 
order to even up the score and so that he can keep "hating James in 
peace."  But, we know this is a lie.  Snape is protecting Harry because of 
Lily and James' only part in the equation is that Harry's resemblance to
his father increases Snape's dislike of him.

In PoA, Lupin explains that Snape resented the Marauders ("spied on us"
growls Sirius), and even more so after the Prank.  Snape doesn't 
contradict this, but he has a lot more reasons to hate Sirius at this point.
As far as he knows, Sirius betrayed Lily and is as complicit in her 
murder as Snape himself--and now he's trying to kill Lily's child.  
And, when Snape throws that hissy fit at Harry about James earlier in the
book, Snape might be angry at James or he might be angry at Harry 
for foolishly endangering himself and at Dumbledore for referring to
a story that Snape doesn't want told.

Lupin tells us at the end of the book that Snape "let slip" about his
werewolf-positive status.  We don't know how that happened, so 
I don't think we can conclude with certainty that Snape did that
out of a grudge towards Lupin.  If it was, it probably more related
to the whole fiasco of the previous night and not from their
childhood relationship.

In GoF and OotP, we see that Snape and Sirius both hate/dislike
each other, but we don't see much indication that Snape continues
to hold a grudge after Sirius is dead.  He never mentions Sirius to
Harry, and that detention thing might be less about his dislike
of James and Sirius and more about teaching Harry that cursing 
other people is wrong.

In DH, Snape risks his cover to help Lupin out, so I think the grudge
is over at that point.

So, I don't hold that Snape wastes his life by holding grudges
against dead people (who are dead and thus couldn't care less
what he's doing).  If his life is wasted, it's wasted because he's
keeping to a promise he made when he was suicidally depressed.
Or, alternately, that he inadvertently set a murderer on the 
woman he loved, after losing her friendship due to his racist
views.

But it wasn't about James at all.  Compared to his relationship
with Lily and his mission towards Voldemort, the Marauders were
very small potatoes.

Montavilla47







From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sun May  3 18:34:47 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 18:34:47 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtkmv7+35vd@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtko47+n8sl@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186418

> Montavilla47:
<BIG SNIP>
> Lupin tells us at the end of the book that Snape "let slip" about his
> werewolf-positive status.  We don't know how that happened, so 
> I don't think we can conclude with certainty that Snape did that
> out of a grudge towards Lupin.  If it was, it probably more related
> to the whole fiasco of the previous night and not from their
> childhood relationship.

Alla:

I will grant you that both interpretations are possible, but I do not see how the one that you offer is more possible than mine - that it was mainly due to his grudge towards Lupin.


Montavilla47
> In GoF and OotP, we see that Snape and Sirius both hate/dislike
> each other, but we don't see much indication that Snape continues
> to hold a grudge after Sirius is dead.  He never mentions Sirius to
> Harry, and that detention thing might be less about his dislike
> of James and Sirius and more about teaching Harry that cursing 
> other people is wrong.

Alla:

Well, I do not feel that Snape ever wanted to teach Harry any moral lessons and only took out his anger on him, again, based on Snape previous behavior I find it hard to believe, IMO of course.

But sure, of course Snape does not mention Sirius to Harry for **two years roughly**, no? Actually I think it should be one year since in DH Snape does not have much possibility to do so. So I am happy to agree to Snape holding a grudge against Sirius for many many many years after they were out of school and not after Sirius' death for the sake of this argument only


Montavilla47 
> In DH, Snape risks his cover to help Lupin out, so I think the grudge
> is over at that point.:

Alla:

Oh I do not. I think it is very in line with what Harry is being told in PS/SS (hated but not want you dead). IMO of course.


Montavilla47: 
> So, I don't hold that Snape wastes his life by holding grudges
> against dead people (who are dead and thus couldn't care less
> what he's doing).  If his life is wasted, it's wasted because he's
> keeping to a promise he made when he was suicidally depressed.
> Or, alternately, that he inadvertently set a murderer on the 
> woman he loved, after losing her friendship due to his racist
> views.
> 
> But it wasn't about James at all.  Compared to his relationship
> with Lily and his mission towards Voldemort, the Marauders were
> very small potatoes.

Alla:

I think it was very much about James - that he stole Snape's girl, etc. Not that she ever was Snape's girl of course.

Now I think at the point when Snape screams this, James is LONG dead, isn't he? Doesn't sound to me as if Snape stop holding grudges at all.

"You dare use my own spells against me, Potter? It was I who invented them - I, the Half-Blood Prince! And you'd turn my inventions on me, like your filfy father, would you? I don't think so...no!" - HBP, p.604

Alla:

And of course nobody has to agree with me on that, but I feel that matter of Snape's death supports metaphorically that he was holding grudges and in a way got his wish at the end.

He oh so resented James saving him from the possible dangerous bite, that at the end of his life he after all died in Shrieking Shack, from the dangerous bite. As if James' saving his life never happened.

I know I said it before, but I find it extremely fitting for Snape.

JMO,

Alla
A




From catlady at wicca.net  Sun May  3 21:55:05 2009
From: catlady at wicca.net (Catlady (Rita Prince Winston))
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 21:55:05 -0000
Subject: Easier /  Insecure!Ron + Hermione / The sword in the pond
Message-ID: <gtl3rp+8rkh@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186419

Magpie wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186357>:

<< The idea of somebody saying "Well, I just cut off my own hand because it was easier" just sounds hilarious. >>

And Pippin replied in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186358>:

<< Not if you finish the sentence "easier than getting killed." >>

I find the rest of Pippin's post to be insightful, but I don't agree with this one sentence. My thought is not about good and evil and whether to obey a terrifying monster's command, but about a news report I once heard about a man who cut off his own arm with a pocket knife because it was trapped under a boulder and he would die of dehydration and exposure if he didn't get out of that isolated canyon ... 

Googling 'man cuts off arm to survive' is apparently a common enough search that Google filled it in at 'man cuts' (who'd have thought it?) and got 1,790,000 hits, and the first hit <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5956900/> seems to be the event of which I was thinking, and the second hit <http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/21973683/> is a completely different example.

And these are examples in which it is MUCH EASIER to die. Physically painful and mentally both scary and distasteful, but the person can scream, or cry, or pray to be found acceptable to go to Heaven, or close their eyes and grit their teeth and try to be spartan, but in any of those cases, they WILL die without making any choice or doing any act to bring on death (other than having gotten into the situation in the first place, but I mean once they are in the situation). Something that happens without any action or choice at all on one's part is EASIER than taking an action, any action, let alone this action.

Carol wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186369>:

<< he has the confidence to let *Hermione* destroy the cup Horcrux after he has had the resourcefulness to get them into the Chamber of Secrets in the first place. >>

I kind of had the idea that Ron *made* (rather than *let*) Hermione destroy the cup Horcrux, and that a leading part of his motive was for Hermione to undergo that experience of being wrung out, so she would be less arrogant. 

If he were still insecure!Ron, he would not have wanted her to watch him destroy a Horcrux because he would not want her to see him confronting his inmost hopes and fears. So I kind of hope he gave Hermione some privacy to destroy the cup, because if he watched her confront her inmost hopes and fears while she had not watched his, he would be kind of one-up on her.

Carol wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186372>:

<< hates the abstraction of sociological terms and simply does not think in that way >>

Just a note: I personally find the terms 'internal validation' and 'external validation' to describe what I was already experiencing, rather than to be abstract sociological terms.

Carol wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186381>:

<< He must, that is, make retrieving the sword as difficult and
dangerous as possible so that Harry must demonstrate "valor" in order to retrieve it. >>

Not 'as difficult as possible' (Snape could have added some cold-loving aquatic biting monsters to the pool), just 'difficult enough'. I wouldn't have bothered posting this little nitpick except that I wanted to make another comment on this post:

<< wondering whether Snape would have proven himself "a true Gryffindor" by jumping in and saving Harry had Ron not shown up >>

Considering Snape's abilities, he might be able to rescue Harry with just 'Accio Harry'. Or conjuring up a special rope with a grabber at the end to grab Harry to pull him out (I don't know if Muggles have such a rope, but we *could*, by putting a wire in the rope and an actuator in the grabber so that the operator presses a button a his/her end to open and close the grabber). Or, if he had to jump in and grab Harry, he could surround himself, not just his head, with a bubble that would not only keeping him breathing, and dry, but also warm.





From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Sun May  3 22:38:07 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 22:38:07 -0000
Subject: Easier /  Insecure!Ron + Hermione / The sword in the pond
In-Reply-To: <gtl3rp+8rkh@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtl6cf+rmvq@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186420

Catlady:

> Considering Snape's abilities, he might be able to rescue Harry with just 'Accio Harry'. Or conjuring up a special rope with a grabber at the end to grab Harry to pull him out (I don't know if Muggles have such a rope, but we *could*, by putting a wire in the rope and an actuator in the grabber so that the operator presses a button a his/her end to open and close the grabber). Or, if he had to jump in and grab Harry, he could surround himself, not just his head, with a bubble that would not only keeping him breathing, and dry, but also warm.
>

Montavilla47:

Begging the question of why Harry, after OotP, wouldn't know how to cast the
bubblehead charm for himself.







From foxmoth at qnet.com  Mon May  4 00:36:33 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Mon, 04 May 2009 00:36:33 -0000
Subject: Easier /  Insecure!Ron + Hermione / The sword in the pond
In-Reply-To: <gtl3rp+8rkh@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtldah+33sv@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186421

Catlady" 
> And Pippin replied in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186358>:
> 
> << Not if you finish the sentence "easier than getting killed." >>
> 
> I find the rest of Pippin's post to be insightful, but I don't agree with this one sentence.
<snip>. .
> 
> And these are examples in which it is MUCH EASIER to die. Physically painful and mentally both scary and distasteful, but the person can scream, or cry, or pray to be found acceptable to go to Heaven, or close their eyes and grit their teeth and try to be spartan, but in any of those cases, they WILL die without making any choice or doing any act to bring on death (other than having gotten into the situation in the first place, but I mean once they are in the situation). Something that happens without any action or choice at all on one's part is EASIER than taking an action, any action, let alone this action.

Pippin:
I take your point. But  Peter was going to be fed to Nagini if he failed Voldemort (GoF ch 29). So I will correct my sentence to  "easier than  offering yourself as prey for a giant snake." :) 

Voldemort killed Frank Bryce, Bertha Jorkins and Charity Burbage before letting Nagini devour them, but they hadn't betrayed him. If I were Peter, I would be by no means sure that Voldemort would give me a quick death. 

Pippin





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Mon May  4 02:10:13 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Mon, 04 May 2009 02:10:13 -0000
Subject: Snape's test
In-Reply-To: <gtii8q+iq6i@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtliq5+qces@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186422


> >
> Carol notes:
> As far as I can tell, Dumbledore dies thinking that he and Harry have actually found a Horcrux (he never sees RAB's note), so Portrait!DD would think that HRH already have a Horcrux that they need to destroy.

Pippin:
Would a wizard like Dumbledore  need a note from RAB to tell the difference between a crude fake and the real thing? Surely he could sense that there was no trace of Voldemort's magic. He let out a groan when Harry said that at least they got the horcrux.  I very much doubt that Dumbledore was fooled for a moment once he laid hands on the thing. He could tell at once that the diary in CoS no longer held either Riddle's memories or his soul, while even Ron and Hermione could sense the presence within the locket. 

It's true, Dumbledore knows, or rather hopes,  that Harry *will* need the sword. But the sword must react to present needs, not potential ones. Even in the Chamber, it doesn't present itself until Harry asks for help. 


Pippin






From randmath23 at yahoo.com  Sun May  3 11:54:33 2009
From: randmath23 at yahoo.com (randmath23)
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 11:54:33 -0000
Subject: Harry Potter as Christ
Message-ID: <gtk0lp+riss@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186423

I do not consider Harry Potter to be a Christ-like character,
I believe that Harry was indeed predestined to defeat one of
the most evil wizards of all time in Great Britain.  I have
often wondered why Dumbledore could not simply used a time
turner when he found out what had happened to Lily and James
Potter.  I realize that if he had done so then the future
could have turned out very badly indeed.  Unlike Christ, Harry
did not do any miracles, unless a person counts magic.  To a
muggle witnessing magic being performed this would seem like
a miracle.  We are not given a great deal of information into
Christ's childhood growing up.  Unlike Harry's which was one
of neglect and often times downright child abuse, Christ's
childhood was more than likely an average one for a Jewish
child growing up in that period of time.  Like Christ, Harry
did attract many friends.  These were not followers like
Christ's were.  Hermione and Ron had a deep and lasting
friendship with Harry.  This developed over many years and
over many trials and hardships.  Lastly, while Christ had a
"mission" to be the savior of all mankind, Harry did save the
wizard world from Voltermort.  He did not conquer the world
from evil, like Christ did.

randmath23




From no.limberger at gmail.com  Mon May  4 18:49:53 2009
From: no.limberger at gmail.com (No Limberger)
Date: Mon, 4 May 2009 11:49:53 -0700
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Right vs. Easy (Ron WAS: Re: DH reread CH 
	4-5)
In-Reply-To: <98AB37298EDD4C6597B789B26F30A0C0@JerriPC>
References: <1241171128.558.56833.m5@yahoogroups.com>
	 <98AB37298EDD4C6597B789B26F30A0C0@JerriPC>
Message-ID: <7ef72f90905041149l129d1f71h9e00cc76e449369a@mail.gmail.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186424

>Jerry wrote:
>SNIP<
>So, they both did what was "right" and both got punished for it.
>Cedric's punishment was the very final one of death.
>Harry's punishment was seeing Cedric die

No.Limberger responds:
I disagree.  The cup was transformed into a portkey to transport
Harry to Voldemort's location to be used in his plot to obtain
a new body.  Neither Harry nor Cedric had any knowledge that
this was the case, nor that Moody was not who he claimed
to be.  Cedric and Harry each did what was right.  Cedric was
unfortunate to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and
was murdered.  Harry was unfortunate to see it.  Neither was
"punishment", it was simply a sad series of events.  Innocent
people can be caught in the crossfire and be wounded or
killed.  This is simply a fact of life that JKR used in GoF.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]




From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Mon May  4 19:37:22 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Mon, 04 May 2009 19:37:22 -0000
Subject: MAGICkal elITE - The Boy, The Man, The Hero, the Saint.
In-Reply-To: <gtk0eo+b0f6@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtng5i+kchu@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186425

---  "Geoff Bannister" <gbannister10 at ...> wrote:
>
> ---  "Steve" <bboyminn@> wrote:
> >
> > ---  "Geoff Bannister" <gbannister10@> wrote:
>   
> Geoff: 
> > > I consider Harry as an everyman because I cannot see him as 
> > > Christ as some people do. ...
> > > 
> > > 
> > > <snip>
>  
> bboyminn: 
> > ...
>  
> > First, I don't think anyone can remotely imply that Harry is
> > 'Christ' in the story. But he could symbolically and 
> > metaphorically represent a Christ-like figure.
> 
> Geoff:
> ...
> 
> You are echoing what I have been saying for a week or so, 
> namely that I cannot accept the idea of someone being a 
> Christ figure, but they *can* be Christ-like. 
> 
> As I wrote, I find Kemper's position arguable in that he 
> cannot accept either the Christ or Everyman positions and 
> so postulates a third way - the "Harry is an alien" which 
> seems (to me) decidedly strange.
>

bboyminn:

It depends on what you mean by 'alien'. If a person means that
Harry is a space alien, then I simply can't buy it. However,
if they simply mean that Harry is an outsider, I can see it,
though I think it is a little thin to base a whole foundation
on.

I think perhaps Harry sees himself as something of an 
alien/outsider, especially at the beginning of the series. He
knows he doesn't quite fit into the muggle world, though a
certain blame for that feeling of 'outsider' falls on the
Dursleys. Then he is taken into the wizard world where he 
still feels like an outsider. Ron, in Harry's eyes, knows
everything about magic, and Harry doesn't make the best start
at Hogwart's either. 

But as the series goes on, Harry sense of 'alienness' diminishes,
and he comes to see the wizard world as his only true home.

So, much like the 'Christ-like' aspect, though I think less so,
while I don't see Harry as 'alien/outsider', I think in the
beginning he see himself that way.

But again, if we are talking about 'space aliens', I'm just not
buying it.

Oh...and I meant to say that not only are you an educated man of
faith, but also a very intelligent person as well. (Education being no
guarantee of intelligence.)

Steve/bboyminn




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Mon May  4 20:56:20 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Mon, 04 May 2009 20:56:20 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12
Message-ID: <gtnkpk+n5bc@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186426

"I am sorry to hear you're under the weather," said Hermione, talking firmly over the little wizard as he tried to expound upon his problems; it was essential to stop him  reaching the street.
"here, have a sweet."
"Eh? Oh. no thanks --"
"I insist!" said Hermione aggressively, shaking the bags of pastilles in his face. Looking rather alarmed, the little wizard took one.
The effect was instantaneous. The moment the pastille touched his tongue, the little wizard started vomiting so hard that he did not notice as Hermione yanked a handful of hairs from the top of his head.
"Oh dear! she said, as he splattered the alley with sick. "Perhaps you'd better take the day off!"
"No - no!" He choked and retched, trying to continue on his way despite being unable to walk straight. "I must- today- must go-"
But that's just silly!" said Hermione, alarmed. "You can't go to work in this state - I think you ought to go to St. Mungo's and get them to sort you out!"
The wizard had collapsed, heaving, on all fours, strill trying to crawl towards the main street.
"You simply can't go to work like this!" cried Hermione.
At last he seemed to  accept the truth of her words. Using a repulsed Hermione to claw his way back into a standing position, he turned on the spot and vanished, leaving nothing behind but the bag Ron had snatched from his hand as he went, and some flying chunks of vomit" 
"Urgh," said Hermione, holding up the skirts of her robe to avoid the puddles of sick, "it would have made much less mess to Stun him too".

- p.196

Alla:
 I cut Ron's response because it is just way too much to type as it is, but no kidding Hermione, huh?

Yes, much less mess and less suffering for poor man as well.

You see, when our good characters do staff like this THAT annoys the hell out of me, much more than say Hermione putting that curse on whoever will betray DA or Harry's Crucio. That's because I am tolerant in the fiction land to the characters reacting to provocation or doing staff which I feel is in essense self defense, you know, no matter how out of proportion it may feel for real life? (IMO of course).

But here? Hermione dear just made the person violently sick by force feeding him candy he wanted no part of (HA, good sense he has), of course with Ron and Harry's approval, do not think that I am letting them off the hook here, they discussed the plan together. The person did nothing to them except having a misfortune to be somebody they decided to impersonate. And when this poor guy leans on Hermione she has a nerve  to look repulsed when she made him so sick in the first place. Ugh, very big slap Hermione moment for me, and slap Harry and Ron too of course.

"We have to flush ourselves in?" he whispered.
"Looks like it," Harry whispered back, his voice came out deep and gravelly.
They both stood up. Feeling exceptionally foolish, Harry clambered into the toilet" - p.198

Alla:

I find this moment to be hilarious and brilliant bit of political satire.







From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Mon May  4 21:14:49 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Mon, 04 May 2009 21:14:49 -0000
Subject: Snape's "grudge" (Was: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gtkmv7+35vd@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtnls9+hj13@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186427

Montavilla47 wrote:
> 
> May I offer an alternative interpretation?  We have only Dumbledore's and Lupin's word that Snape carried a grudge against James "all those years" because of  their school days/the Prank. In Dumbedore's case, we know he was lying, and in Lupin's case, he could easily be mistaken.

Carol responds:
I wouldn't call it a lie so much as a cover story, a half truth that conceals something more important, in this case, Snape's primary motivation for protecting Harry, which DD is not at liberty to reveal. Dumbledore apparently feels safe in mentioning Snape's schoolboy enmity with James, which was never secret, whereas his love for Lily is a secret known only to Dumbledore, which Dumbledore (against his own instincts, IMO) has promised never to divulge. Much the same thing happens with Dumbledore's injured hand. Rather than hide it and breed speculation, Dumbledore makes sure that it's seen while he encourages people to think that his reflexes have slowed--exactly the same cover story that Snape tells Bellatrix (and, presumably, Voldemort).

As for Lupin, I agree that he's mistaken about Snape's furious antagonism in the Shrieking Shack being the result of a schoolboy grudge, but I don't see how we can expect him to think otherwise. It's the only motivation he's aware of. Both he and Black know about the so-called Prank (which they also know seriously endangered Snape), along with SWM and the whole history of Snape and the Marauders. Lupin also knows that Snape, like everyone including even Dumbledore, thinks that Sirius betrayed the Potters, but he doesn't consider the possibility that Snape might hate Black for that reason rather than what Snape perceives as an attempted murder of one boy by another. Why, in Lupin's view, would Snape, who hated James and called Lily a "filthy little Mudblood," care about that? He does realize that Snape is trying to protect Harry from a man he perceives as a murderer, but when Snape ignores his statement that Black isn't there to kill Harry, he retorts with his remark about a schoolboy grudge and calls Snape a fool, ruining any chance he might have had to convince Snape that he's mistaken (PoA Am. ed. 559).

Montavilla (out of sequence): 
> Lupin tells us at the end of the book that Snape "let slip" about his werewolf-positive status.  We don't know how that happened, so I don't think we can conclude with certainty that Snape did that out of a grudge towards Lupin. If it was, it probably more related to the whole fiasco of the previous night and not from their childhood relationship.

Carol:
I agree. The narrative is set up to make Snape's hatred of MWPP (seemingly based solely on the "Prank") appear to be his sole or primary motivation both in going after Lupin to the Shrieking Shack and in "letting slip" at breakfast that he's a werewolf. Actually, Lupin blames it on the loss of Snape's Order of Merlin, another red herring motivation (perhaps supplied by DD as a cover story since Lupin himself didn't witness Snape's "disappointment"). Later, in HBP, Lupin blames Snape's "outing" him on Snape's wanting his post as DADA teacher. Either way, Snape's motivation appears to be petty revenge while Lupin appears to be the innocent victim of prejudice against werewolves.

Neither explanation takes into account that Lupin himself endangered HRH by running out onto the grounds after failing to take the potion and would have lost his job in any case. (Hagrid, who does not know that HRH already know all about it, informs them that Lupin is a werewolf, that he was "loose on the grounds last night," and that he's packin' now, of course," 422. He takes it for granted that Lupin should lose his job and that everyone will--and should--know why.)

Nor does Lupin seem to realize that Snape, who did not believe what he heard of Lupin's story, still sees him not only as a danger to the students in general but as the accomplice of the man who tried to kill Harry Potter. Instead, he finds reasons (the Order of Merlin and later wanting the DADA job) why Snape would seek petty revenge by revealing to his students that he, Lupin, is a werewolf. Lupin admits that the information would have leaked out, anyway, and that he could not have kept his job, but he makes it look like prejudice against werewolves and not his own doing. Fudge, of course, would make sure that Lupin didn't remain at Hogwarts if Dumbledore didn't, in which case, the news would have made headlines in the Daily Prophet. But parents not wanting a werewolf teaching their children (which is perfectly true) is beside the point. Even Lupin realizes that he could have bitten any of the Trio and that it "must never happen again" (423). At any rate, cause and effect are thoroughly jumbled and Snape's motivation thoroughly obscured.

Montavilla: 
> In PoA, Lupin explains that Snape resented the Marauders ("spied on us" growls Sirius), and even more so after the Prank.  Snape doesn't contradict this, but he has a lot more reasons to hate Sirius at this point. As far as he knows, Sirius betrayed Lily and is as complicit in her murder as Snape himself--and now he's trying to kill Lily's child. <snipped and moved out of sequence>

Carol:
I agree. We know that Snape (wrongly) thinks that Lupin was helping Black get into the school to kill Harry (really Wormtail). We know that he furiously refuses to believe what he hears of Lupin's explanation. (HRH don't fully believe it at that point, either, and they've heard more than Snape has.) What we don't know is that Snape loved Lily and firmly believes that her death is Black's fault. (IMO, he's doing much the same thing that Harry does later in scapegoating Snape for Black's death, shifting his own share of the blame to someone else because he can't face the truth--and the same thing that Lupin himself does in blaming Snape for his being compelled to resign--or "sacked," as Harry later puts it. It's much easier to blame someone you hate than to own up to your own share of the responsibility.)

Once Snape learns the truth about the Potters' betrayal, which I think confronts him when he sees the black dog transform into Black in GoF and realizes that Lupin's Animagus story must be true, the relationship easily turns back to the old schoolboy antagonism, fueled by Black's use of "Snivellus" and Snape's belief that Black tried to murder him when they were both sixteen.

As for Snape's relationship with Lupin, he made the Wolfbane Potion and made it perfectly even though he hates Lupin and thinks that Lupin is helping Black get into the castle. He knows how dangerous the transformed Lupin can be without that potion. It's self-evident that he doesn't want him loose in the castle or grounds on full-moon nights any more than DD does, and the perfectly brewed potion is certainly a better solution than sending Lupin to the Shrieking Shack to transform (as Snape knows from experience). As long as Lupin is not actively endangering the students, Snape does nothing more than assign an essay on werewolves in the hope that Hermione (or some other bright student?) will figure out that DD is harboring a werewolf. Once Lupin has forgotten his potion and actually endangered HRH, however, he feels safe in "letting slip" what will, as Lupin himself points out to Harry, surely become known, anyway. (Fudge, the Minister for Magic, knows that Lupin is a werewolf and Umbridge has, IIRC, already passed her legislation. And surely, had Lupin not offered his resignation, Dumbledore would have asked for it. Lupin has violated his trust in more ways than one and (once again) shown DD's precautions regarding him to be insufficient.

Again, Snape, AFAWK, still thinks that Lupin was letting Black into the castle to kill Harry. His shock at seeing the transformed Black in GoF (matched by Mrs. Weasley's) shows that he never believed Lupin's Animagus story. Possibly only seeing the living Wormtail at Voldemort's side fully convinced him of its truth. But at the end of PoA, as far as he knows, he's not just outing a werewolf who has endangered Harry Potter, the boy that Snape has promised to protect. He's outing (he thinks) the criminal accomplice of Lily's betrayer, the man who (he thinks) twice helped that betrayer to enter Hogwarts to kill Harry. And that werewolf will, he knows, be losing his post for endangering his students, whether or not Snape reveals that information to his students. 

IOW, I agree that the schoolboy grudge has little or nothing to do with Snape's "outing" Lupin. He thinks (or rather, knows) that Lupin (like Quirrell before him) is dangerous, and he wants him out of Hogwarts. It's true that it's not Snape's job pressure fellow staff members into resigning, either he feels justified in making sure that Lupin has no alternative or he knows that DD is already planning to fire Lupin if Lupin doesn't resign. And we can be pretty sure that DD, too, wanted Lupin gone at this point and was happy to accept his resignation.

Montavilla: 
> In PS/SS, Voldemort told Harry that Snape hated James, but didn't want Harry killed.  That's true enough, but we know that Voldemort was pretty wrong about Snape's motivations.  So, we really can't trust his take on the situation.

Carol:
Actually, this information is provided by Quirrell, who may have attended Hogwarts at about the same time as Snape and the Marauders since he knows about the rivalry. Admittedly, he's described as young, and he conceivably could be as young as twenty-three or -four or so with only a year as Muggle Studies teacher, but Lupin, too, is described as young or "quite young," and he's the same age as Snape, who is 31-32 in SS/PS and 33-34 in PoA. Even if Quirrell was a first year when Snape et al. were sixth or seventh years, he would know about that rivalry. At any rate, it seems to be an open secret, unlike Snape's love for Lily, about which Quirrell could have no inkling. His information is true as far as it goes, but it's incomplete.

Montavilla: 
> Dumbledore supports that theory with his information that Snape hated James for saving his life, telling Harry that Snape was protecting him in order to even up the score and so that he can keep "hating James in peace."  But, we know this is a lie.  Snape is protecting Harry because of Lily and James' only part in the equation is that Harry's resemblance to his father increases Snape's dislike of him.

Carol:
In defense of Dumbledore, he has to give Harry some explanation for Snape's saving his life without giving away Snape's secret, and it's true that James saved Snape's life and that Snape hated him. It's perfectly in character for Snape to want to even the score (he must have hated having his life saved by his worst enemy), and Quirrell has already told Harry that Snape hated his father. The half truth satisfies Harry (who hates Snape himself) and allows DD to provide Snape with a plausible (and probably true) motivation without revealing his primary motivation. DD uses the same tactic in providing Snape with reasons to kill him. Sure, having Snape kill DD will prevent harm to Draco's soul (more important to Snape than to Draco once he understands that his own soul won't be harmed); sure, it will prevent an already dying old man from being tortured by real DEs or savaged by Greyback. It will also, as Snape knows, enable him to come back and protect the students as headmaster. Good and valid reasons, all of them, but not the primary reason, which DD conceals from Snape (ending the power of the Elder Wand). Snape operates in exactly the same way with Bellatrix and Voldemort--half truths and cover stories with the key element hidden.

Montavilla: 
> In GoF and OotP, we see that Snape and Sirius both hate/dislike each other, but we don't see much indication that Snape continues to hold a grudge after Sirius is dead.  He never mentions Sirius to Harry, and that detention thing might be less about his dislike of James and Sirius and more about teaching Harry that cursing other people is wrong.
> 
> In DH, Snape risks his cover to help Lupin out, so I think the grudge is over at that point.

Carol:
I agree. It's Harry's perception, as he walks from the gate to the Great Wall accompanied by Snape (who is deducting points for his lateness and "Muggle attire" and possibly trying to get Harry angry enough to defend himself and in so doing explain what he's been up to) that Snape is glad that Sirius Black is dead. Certainly, Snape is shedding no tears over Black, any more than Black would have shed them over him, but unlike Bellatrix and Narcissa, he makes no remarks to Harry about his "dear godfather" being dead. He seems to be completely indifferent. (Oddly, Wormtail, whom he now knows to be the real betrayer, earns not his hatred but his contempt.)

And, yes. Snape's rescue of Lupin (which does prevent his being AK'd despite the Sectumsempra hitting the wrong target) can only be explained by Snape's willingness to save any life he can from Voldemort and the DEs--even that of an old enemy. (It's Lupin, now willing to believe that Snape murdered Dumbledore, just as he earlier believed that Black had betrayed the Potters to their deaths, who can't let go of the old hatreds. Only DD's trust of Snape held that old enmity in check, and we see a new, vengeance-seeking Lupin in HBP.

Montavilla: 
> So, I don't hold that Snape wastes his life by holding grudges against dead people (who are dead and thus couldn't care less what he's doing).  If his life is wasted, it's wasted because he's keeping to a promise he made when he was suicidally depressed. Or, alternately, that he inadvertently set a murderer on the woman he loved, after losing her friendship due to his racist views.

Carol:
I agree that Snape doesn't waste his life holding grudges (which is not to say that he doesn't hold them, just that the grudges are not as important as they seem in explaining his motivation). It's his remorse for his part in Lily's death and his determination to protect Harry (despite his resemblance to the hated James) so that her death won't be in vain that shapes the rest of his life. True, he never marries, unable to let go of his unrequited love for a dead woman. True, he never finds a career that would give full scope for his many talents. But he does help motivated students to learn Potions. He does serve as Head of Slytherin House (and, in many respects, DD's right hand man at Hogwarts) throughout the books. He does risk his life spying on Voldemort and the Death Eaters, providing DD with information that no one else could provide. And he does help and protect Harry (and even, occasionally, teach him something useful, like Bezoars and Expelliarmus). His is not a happy life, but it's a useful one, and LV could not have been defeated without his contributions.

An aside here: I'm not sure that Snape ever held "racist" views--in quotation marks because Muggle-borns are not a separate race from Purebloods--but certainly he lost Lily's friendship because of his unwillingness to dissociate himself from his "little Death Eater friends" and because he used the "bloodist" slur "Mudblood" in his rage and humiliation. But his undying regret and his unrequited love lead to remorse which leads to repentance and a life devoted to serving Dumbledore and undermining Voldemort and protecting Harry (as close as he can come to restitution), all of which leads, ultimately, to redemption. I don't know about anyone else, but I wouldn't call that a wasted life. 

And if Lupin can be happy in the afterlife, free of the ravages of his lycanthropy, I see no reason why Snape can't be happy, too, freed of regret and resentment and bitterness. I'd like to think that he and the three "good" Marauders at last understand and respect each other.

Montevilla: 
> But it wasn't about James at all.  Compared to his relationship with Lily and his mission towards Voldemort, the Marauders were very small potatoes.

Carol:
I can't say that it wasn't about James "at all." His hatred and resentment of James (shown in the shouted "your filthy father" at the end of HBP) certainly played a part, preventing Snape from ever liking Harry and causing Snape to see Harry's rule-breaking and (occasional) arrogance but not his better qualities and motives. It's probably safe to say that, had he resembled Lily, the whole Snape/Harry dynamic would have been different.

Nevertheless, I agree with you that the Marauders were "small potatoes" compared with Lily and the destruction of Voldemort. They serve primarily to distract Harry and the reader from Snape's true or primary motives, which JKR is withholding (except for sufficient hints to make the real story plausible) until "The Prince's Tale." Snape's pettiness and vindictiveness must overshadow his courage and determination and cast doubts on his loyalty, providing a plausible motivation for his good acts (like going into the Shrieking Shack to save Harry from the werewolf and the "murderer") and make others (like "outing" Lupin) seem nothing more than petty acts of vengeance.

I am not by any means denying Snape's sarcasm and unfairness or his tendency to leap to conclusions. I'm just saying that his hatred of the Marauders, though real, is not his primary motivation in PoA or any other book. In short, I agree in general that the grudge is "small potatoes," but I think it serves as an important diversionary tactic, misleading the reader--and Harry--with regard to Snape's true intentions and motives, much as Fake!Moody's seeming kindness to Harry misled us as to his evil intentions in GoF. The difference is that the Snape diversion (for lack of a better term) is sustained over almost the entire series rather than just one book.

Carol, whose attempts to shorten this post paradoxically resulted in making it longer!




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Mon May  4 22:45:06 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Mon, 04 May 2009 22:45:06 -0000
Subject: Easier /  Insecure!Ron + Hermione / The sword in the pond
In-Reply-To: <gtl3rp+8rkh@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtnr5i+hhr6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186428

Magpie wrote:
> 
> << The idea of somebody saying "Well, I just cut off my own hand because it was easier" just sounds hilarious. >>
> 
Pippin replied:
> 
> << Not if you finish the sentence "easier than getting killed." >>

Catlady responded:
> I find the rest of Pippin's post to be insightful, but I don't agree with this one sentence. My thought is not about good and evil and whether to obey a terrifying monster's command, but about a news report I once heard about a man who cut off his own arm with a pocket knife because it was trapped under a boulder and he would die of dehydration and exposure if he didn't get out of that isolated canyon ... <snip>

Carol responds:
I'm not sure that "right vs. easy" applies to Wormtail at all, especially once we get past his initial choice to betray the Potters. Clearly, the right choice in that instance was to hold out against threats and torture and keep the secret with which he had been entrusted. Not that betraying his friends was *easy*--he seems to have felt about it if Lily's letter to Padfoot is any indication, but it was certainly easier than doing the right thing and staying true to his friends. But in that instance, the "easy" choice was also unquestionably the *wrong* choice. He betrayed them to their deaths. 

Peter's next clear choice, between confessing his crime and going to Azkaban or framing Sirius (and killing a dozen Muggles in the process) can also be presented as right vs. easy, but it, too, is a clear case of right vs. wrong. How many people, even in RL, would find  betrayal and murder "easier" than taking responsibility for a previous crime and going to prison? (Sure, criminals make this choice all the time, but would a good person who had betrayed a friend out of cowardice find it "easy" to compound his crimes in this way? Or has "right vs. easy" ceased to apply, leaving Wormtail with the simple choice of right vs. wrong (and courage vs. self-preserving cowardice)?

Obviously, hiding out in rat form rather than turning himself in is "easy," but I don't think it's a choice since he never considers the alternative. And even making the effort to escape from Crookshanks (and Sirius) isn't right vs. easy; it's self-preservation vs. comfort, with the "easy" choice of staying put being most likely fatal. Since staying with Lupin and Black once he's caught is not an option in Wormtail's book and staying on as Ron's rat is no longer possible, the next choice is whether to return to Lord Voldemort (now living in vapor form somewhere in Albania) or take the chance of being found and caught again by his former friends. Just how returning to Voldemort, talking to rats and other small animals to track down the monster that's possessing and killing them, qualifies as an easy choice, I'm not sure. Surely, living in the sewers would be easier--and less dangerous. But Peter, feeling weak and vulnerable, I suppose, chooses to return to the biggest bully on the block, even though that bully doesn't even have a body. And he chooses to serve that bullying master, actually restoring him to not one but two bodies, not as a choice between right and easy but as a choice between serving a powerful master and having no protection. He has, as Voldemort points out in GoF, no place else to go.

Even cutting off his arm is not a choice between right vs. easy. The easy choice would be,as Harry thinks, to "let it drown"--or, at least, to leave the helpless but unquestionably evil creature to die. Whether that would also be the right choice, we can all decide for ourselves, but it seems to me more right--or less wrong--than restoring an evil overlord to a body that will enable him to do great harm. But Wormtail, perhaps fearing retribution from the thing in the cauldron, makes the hard choice of cutting off his own hand. Whatever choice he's facing, it isn't a moral one. I suppose he knows that cutting off his own right hand is the only way he can bring back the master he loathes and fears but without whom he is, he thinks, in much greater danger. And besides, it seems, Voldemort has promised him a new hand in place of the old one. A little pain, a little blood, and then--a beautiful silver hand, the like of which no one has ever seen. Or so I gather from Wormtail's subsequent actions and Voldemort's words.

At the end of his life, Wormtail is offered one last choice, not between right and easy but between right (mercy in return for mercy) and wrong (killing someone who has shown him mercy). Ironically, he pays with his life for making the clear right choice.

Of course, had he chosen right vs. easy in the first place, he would never have faced all those other choices. He would be dead.

Carol earlier:
> 
> << [Ron] he has the confidence to let *Hermione* destroy the cup Horcrux after he has had the resourcefulness to get them into the Chamber of Secrets in the first place. >>

Catlady 
> I kind of had the idea that Ron *made* (rather than *let*) Hermione destroy the cup Horcrux, and that a leading part of his motive was for Hermione to undergo that experience of being wrung out, so she would be less arrogant. 
> 
> If he were still insecure!Ron, he would not have wanted her to watch him destroy a Horcrux because he would not want her to see him confronting his inmost hopes and fears. So I kind of hope he gave Hermione some privacy to destroy the cup, because if he watched her confront her inmost hopes and fears while she had not watched his, he would be kind of one-up on her.

Carol responds:
That's an interesting interpretation, but I don't see any evidence to support it. Ron simply says that he thought she should stab it "because she hadn't had the pleasure yet" (DH 623). Hermione at this point, judging from her behavior afterwards, is already glowing with admiration for Ron. It's his idea to enter the CoS and use a Basilisk fang to destroy the cup Horcrux. He manages to remember the word in Parseltongue for "Open!" and open the Chamber. She keeps repeating that he was "Amazing!"

Naturally, under those circumstances, our chivalrous Gryffindor, who has already proven himself worthy by destroying a Horcrux, would offer Hermione her own chance. 

As for offering her privacy to destroy the cup, I see no reason why it would know her inmost fears. She hasn't written in it as Ginny wrote in the diary or worn it close to her heart as they all wore the locket. She hasn't had it long enough to form any sort of bond with it, and after the locket, I think they'd all be leery of holding it much. In fact, I'm not even sure how the cup Horcrux would have formed a bond with anyone. You can't wear a cup as you can a locket or a ring or even a tiara. Would you just stare at it and admire it for its beauty and craftsmanship, as Helga apparently used to do before it was Horcruxed? Would you have to drink from it to feel its powers? It doesn't seem to have been cursed like the ring, and it can't be opened  like the locket. How would you even interact with it?

In any case, there's no indication of any struggle with it. Just Hermione stabbing it because Ron thought that she should, Hermione praising Ron to the skies (for a change), and Ron saying that "it was nothing." I don't think he'd say that if Hermione had struggled with the Horcrux and triumphed over it as he triumphed over the locket.
 
Carol, snipping the other comments because the post is already too long




From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Mon May  4 23:17:36 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Mon, 04 May 2009 23:17:36 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtkmv7+35vd@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtnt2g+2irg@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186429

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "montavilla47" <montavilla47 at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth@> wrote:
> > Pippin:
> > 
 
> Montavilla47:
> 
> May I offer an alternative interpretation?  We have only Dumbledore's and 
> Lupin's word that Snape carried a grudge against James "all those years" 
> because of  their school days/the Prank. In Dumbedore's case, we know he 
> was lying, and in Lupin's case, he could easily be mistaken.

jkoney:
Actually we have Snape's actions to show us that he held a grudge against a dead man. It starts with the celebrity comment the first day of class and ends with the filthy father comment at the end of HBP.

If he wasn't still holding a grudge why would he start on Harry the first day of class? Why would he bring up his father while they were fighting?


> Montavilla47
> So, I don't hold that Snape wastes his life by holding grudges
> against dead people (who are dead and thus couldn't care less
> what he's doing).  If his life is wasted, it's wasted because he's
> keeping to a promise he made when he was suicidally depressed.
> Or, alternately, that he inadvertently set a murderer on the 
> woman he loved, after losing her friendship due to his racist
> views.
> 
> But it wasn't about James at all.  Compared to his relationship
> with Lily and his mission towards Voldemort, the Marauders were
> very small potatoes.
> 
> Montavilla47
>

jkoney:
He didn't totally waste his life, but he also didn't do much with it until he was needed as a spy.

He was never able to reach out to his students and actually teach them, unless they were highly motivated. He had a decade before Harry arrived and it doesn't seem like he did much in that time period.

Once he was needed he fulfilled his duties. 

The grudge against the Marauders may have been small potato's but that doesn't mean it still didn't exist and influence his actions. 





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Mon May  4 23:19:57 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Mon, 04 May 2009 23:19:57 -0000
Subject: Snape's test
In-Reply-To: <gtliq5+qces@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtnt6t+6h7v@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186430

Carol earlier:
> > As far as I can tell, Dumbledore dies thinking that he and Harry have actually found a Horcrux (he never sees RAB's note), so Portrait!DD would think that HRH already have a Horcrux that they need to destroy.
> 
> Pippin:
> Would a wizard like Dumbledore  need a note from RAB to tell the difference between a crude fake and the real thing? Surely he could sense that there was no trace of Voldemort's magic. He let out a groan when Harry said that at least they got the horcrux.  I very much doubt that Dumbledore was fooled for a moment once he laid hands on the thing. He could tell at once that the diary in CoS no longer held either Riddle's memories or his soul, while even Ron and Hermione could sense the presence within the locket. 
> 
> It's true, Dumbledore knows, or rather hopes,  that Harry *will* need the sword. But the sword must react to present needs, not potential ones. Even in the Chamber, it doesn't present itself until Harry asks for help. 
> 

Carol:
Maybe DD knew that it was fake, but he is in desperate trouble and only stuffs it into his pocket, so it's impossible to tell. But he still knew, as he knew when he wrote the will, that Harry would need the sword when he found the real Horcrux.

And Portrait!DD (who informed Snape of the conditions to be met) must have known from Phineas Nigellus (who knew about the Horcruxes even though Snape didn't) that the Trio were taking turns wearing Slytherin's locket. So DD would know, one way or the other, that the "need" criterion had already been met--present need rather than future need--and that it was time to tell Snape that the sword could only be taken under conditions of need and valor. (Snape, who knew that they needed the sword but didn't know why, also seems to have viewed the "need" criterion as already met and concentrated on creating a test that would require "valor"--at least in the crude sense of finding the courage to overcome danger, difficulty, and discomfort.) The only reason for further delay was that neither Snape nor Portrait!DD knew where the Trio/HH were staying until Phineas reported that they were in the Forest Dean, at which point Snape, who already knew the criteria and had already formed his plan, set out to find them.

Back to present need (to destroy the Horcrux they already had rather than future Horcruxes): The sword, presumably, senses the presence of the Horcrux around Harry's neck just as the Horcrux senses the presence of the sword and tries to strangle Harry, so in allowing Harry or Ron to retrieve it, it *is* reacting to "present need." I don't know what would have happened if it hadn't sensed the Horcrux (would it have vanished?), but Harry's need is not the type that requires the sword to come to him so that he can fight for his life as he was doing against the Basilisk. Calling "help" (or trying to summon the sword) isn't going to work this time. He has to earn it through "valor." And, again, whether diving in to retrieve it would have been sufficient to meet that test, we don't know. All we know is that Ron, diving in to save Harry, met both tests and earned the right to use the sword on the Horcrux that Portrait!DD must have known they already had.

Carol, tempted to check all the scenes in which Phineas Nigellus is present but already taking too much time with today's posts




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Mon May  4 23:35:32 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Mon, 04 May 2009 23:35:32 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12
In-Reply-To: <gtnkpk+n5bc@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtnu45+f6d5@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186431

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:

> But here? Hermione dear just made the person violently sick by force feeding him candy he wanted no part of (HA, good sense he has), of course with Ron and Harry's approval, do not think that I am letting them off the hook here, they discussed the plan together. The person did nothing to them except having a misfortune to be somebody they decided to impersonate. And when this poor guy leans on Hermione she has a nerve  to look repulsed when she made him so sick in the first place. Ugh, very big slap Hermione moment for me, and slap Harry and Ron too of course.

Pippin:
As with the cruciatus curse, the moral argument is not in DH because it was given already. 

Hermione is the one who made such a fuss in OOP over Fred and George testing the pastilles on first years, though they  at least had consented and were getting compensated too.  She's got to be at least as wrong here as Fred and George were then.

 
If Voldemort had ordered Hermione to poison an innocent person, I'm sure she would have died first. But DH is all about the way that people with decent values who would never give in to threats or blackmail can temporarily lose their moral compass through distraction  or emotional upheaval. 


IMO, JKR doesn't give us a moment where Hermione questions what's happened to her values, because nothing has happened to them. 

  In the Potterverse, IMO, your values are a part of you, for better or for worse. They do change, but you can't change them like you'd change your shirt, in no time or with little effort. It isn't as easy for Draco to become a killer as the innocent believe, but he can't easily become a hero either.  

Hermione's values are the same as they ever were, IMO. She didn't change her ideas about good and evil, it just got too difficult to keep them in mind, much less live up to them.

The moral discussion of the cruciatus curse is in GoF, where Sirius opines (summarizing) that Crouch may have been a good man once, but he authorized the aurors to use unforgivable curses against Death Eaters and condemned people without trial. 

Now, that's just what Harry did when he punished Amycus. 

So, by Sirius's standards, Harry wasn't being good while he did those things. But did Harry, as Sirius believes of Crouch, become as cruel and ruthless as a Death Eater? Or was Sirius wrong, too innocent  to understand?

The question GoF didn't answer was how Barty, who was always vehemently anti-Dark Arts, could feel that fighting fire with fire was okay. In DH we got the answer: the infamous greater good. It's a tricky argument, because "the greater good" is a valid moral position: it is generally accepted that laws are made to serve the common good, and not the other way round. 

One could argue that fighting fire with fire is a necessary evil -- that's what Barty seems to have thought. But IMO McGonagall gives us JKR's verdict on that line of reasoning: it's foolish. Because unless you are indeed as cruel and ruthless as a Death Eater, they are always going to win at that game, just as Barty Sr's moments of mercy led to Barty Jr's escape. And that won't serve the greater good at all.

Harry doesn't need anyone to point this out to him -- he's lived it all. 

Up to the moment when Dumbledore confesses, JKR doesn't tell us in DH when  her good characters are doing bad things. She wants us to choose what is right, being critical of people whom we would like to admire, rather than what is easy,  supposing that whatever the good guys do must be okay. But as you said, the cruciatus curse is so obviously wrong that unless you have a different set of moral standards for fictional people than for real ones, it would be very hard to approve of it.

Pippin






From foxmoth at qnet.com  Tue May  5 02:52:30 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 02:52:30 -0000
Subject: Easier /  Insecure!Ron + Hermione / The sword in the pond
In-Reply-To: <gtnr5i+hhr6@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gto9le+ifdt@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186432

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
 
> Carol responds:
. How many people, even in RL, would find  betrayal and murder "easier" than taking responsibility for a previous crime and going to prison? 

Pippin:
It's not clear that Peter intended to commit murder. If there was a curse that killed twelve people at once, Voldemort would surely have discovered and used it. It sounds as if the Ministry's cover story was partially correct and Peter exploded a gas main unintentionally when he used diffindo or reducto to blow a hole in the street. Peter may have become a killer more out of fear than out of hatred or indifference.

If those people had not died, then Sirius's laughter, if it had still taken place, would not have seemed so horrible, and he probably would have had a chance to explain himself. 

Ironically the belief that such a spell did exist may have been what convinced Voldemort that the Elder Wand had failed him. 
 
Carol:
 Surely, living in the sewers would be easier--and less dangerous.

Pippin:
Peter knows that once the Ministry knows he is still alive, the DE's still at large will find out too. He will have no protector, and Peter can't face life without a protector, even one that he loathes as much as Voldemort.

Carol: 
> Even cutting off his arm is not a choice between right vs. easy. The easy choice would be,as Harry thinks, to "let it drown"--or, at least, to leave the helpless but unquestionably evil creature to die.

Pippin:
Um, aren't you forgetting that Voldemort can't die? If the creature drowns, LV  will only return to the bodiless state in which Peter found him -- a state in which Voldie can still possess Nagini, if not Peter himself.  Peter's rat form won't help him to escape a snake. And Voldemort doesn't need Peter so much now that he has Barty. No, Peter does not have a lot of options here.

The point is not that Peter's choices aren't wrong. Of course they are. But he's not choosing them because he's decided that being evil will make him happier than being good.  He's choosing them because it's easier than being good. 

Pippin




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Tue May  5 04:52:59 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 04:52:59 -0000
Subject: Easier /  Insecure!Ron + Hermione / The sword in the pond
In-Reply-To: <gto9le+ifdt@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtognb+jbkc@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186433

Carol earlier:
> How many people, even in RL, would find  betrayal and murder "easier" than taking responsibility for a previous crime and going to prison? 
> 
Pippin responded:
> It's not clear that Peter intended to commit murder. If there was a curse that killed twelve people at once, Voldemort would surely have discovered and used it. It sounds as if the Ministry's cover story was partially correct and Peter exploded a gas main unintentionally when he used diffindo or reducto to blow a hole in the street. Peter may have become a killer more out of fear than out of hatred or indifference.
><snip>

Carol again:
That's an interpretation I haven't encountered before. Surely, if there was any doubt that Peter intended to kill those Muggles, it would have come up in canon. There would have been no need for him to hide from the Aurors, much less blow off his own finger. He couldn't just Stun Black and tell the Aurors that he'd captured Sirius Black, the betrayer of the Potters. Veritaserum and Legilimency could easily show that he was lying. He had to, or thought he had to, frame Black for murder to make it look as if he was unquestionably guilty of betraying the Potters. I don't see how blowing up the street could have served any other purpose. I also think he would have defended himself to Lupin and Black by saying that he didn't mean to kill all those people if it were an accident, but he never says anything about it.

I don't see any canon evidence here, just speculation on your part.
>  
Carol earlier:
>  Surely, living in the sewers would be easier--and less dangerous.
> 
> Pippin:
> Peter knows that once the Ministry knows he is still alive, the DE's still at large will find out too. He will have no protector, and Peter can't face life without a protector, even one that he loathes as much as Voldemort.

Carol responds:
Yes, I'm sure that's Peter's reasoning. But how anyone, DE or former Order member, can find him in the sewers, I don't know. (Of course, he might have to deal with bigger, stronger rats and filth and disease, but no Wizard can find him there. And if he can travel as a rat to Albania (and even show himself briefly in human form there), he could stow away on a ship and end up in Australia, where no one would ever find him. He doesn't need a protector. He only thinks he does.

Carol earlier: 
> > Even cutting off his arm is not a choice between right vs. easy. The easy choice would be,as Harry thinks, to "let it drown"--or, at least, to leave the helpless but unquestionably evil creature to die.
> 
> Pippin:
> Um, aren't you forgetting that Voldemort can't die? If the creature drowns, LV  will only return to the bodiless state in which Peter found him -- a state in which Voldie can still possess Nagini, if not Peter himself.  Peter's rat form won't help him to escape a snake. And Voldemort doesn't need Peter so much now that he has Barty. No, Peter does not have a lot of options here.

Carol:
I'm not forgetting that Voldemort can't die. I'm just not sure that Peter knows it. He knows that Voldie survived the AK, but Voldie was in human form then. Now he's just a helpless, babylike creature. Peter doesn't know about the Horcruxes, so why should he think that Voldie would survive being left alone and unable to fend for himself, or even that he'd turn back into vapor and somehow still be able to harm Wormtail? Harry thinks Voldie can drown; wouldn't Wormtail think the same thing? It just seems odd to me to be so terrified of something so helpless, however revolting. 

And, surely, Peter could escape both the circling Nagini and Baby!mort by Apparating (unless he never learned how to do it, for which we have no evidence). And if Voldie became Vapor!mort again, which probably wouldn't happen for a while because of the Horcrux's protection, there's no guarantee that he could find Wormtail in that state, especially if he was "ripped from his body" and "less than spirit" as he was when he was struck by the rebounding AK. 

All in all, I'm not so sure that Wormtail doesn't have options. He just doesn't seem to be aware of them. He must really be afraid of life on his own (as opposed to Voldemort's retribution)  if he chooses to cut off his hand and serve Voldemort instead. And that choice can't qualify as "easy," as far as I can see.

Pippin: 
> The point is not that Peter's choices aren't wrong. Of course they are. But he's not choosing them because he's decided that being evil will make him happier than being good.  He's choosing them because it's easier than being good. 

Carol:
I understand your argument. I'm just not convinced that it works for Wormtail, whose choices seem to me to fit some other pattern than the "right vs. easy" choices that the good characters are supposed to make. I think in Wormtail's case, it's which will give him the greatest advantage or hurt him least. And choosing to cut off his own hand rather than escape (assuming that he can Apparate) is the hardest of all to fathom.

Carol, who thinks that Wormtail has a surprising amount of talent but apparently not much ability to reason




From no.limberger at gmail.com  Tue May  5 14:43:56 2009
From: no.limberger at gmail.com (No Limberger)
Date: Tue, 5 May 2009 07:43:56 -0700
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: MAGICkal elITE - The Boy, The Man, The Hero, 
	the Saint.
In-Reply-To: <gtjh6f+k8o3@eGroups.com>
References: <gtfmp8+3732@eGroups.com> <gtjh6f+k8o3@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <7ef72f90905050743w5b09fe91xb6c6d9fdb65375e4@mail.gmail.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186434

>bboyminn wrote:
>And I think we see Harry's symbolic death and rebirth in every
>story. The Harry we see at the beginning of the book is not the
>Harry we see at the end of the book. He is older, wiser, and
>more experience; more wiser and more experienced in ways that
>his fellow students are not.

No.Limberger responds:
Exactly.

>bboyminn wrote:
>So, very much Harry is 'everyman', and I think that is a huge
>aspect of the appeal of the stories to people. It is very easy
>to see yourself reflected in Harry. He is not some idealize
>'After School Special' version of a Hero. He is flawed, he has
>troubles, he struggle with the common things that we all
>struggle with. He is an ordinary man who is not afraid to do
>extraordinary things.

No.Limberger responds:
Exactly.

>bboyminn wrote:
>Harry as 'everyman' and 'hero' are very clear, but to draw
>Christ-like parallels, you need to dig pretty deep in to the
>symbology and mythology of the story; pretty deep into the
>subtle and abstract aspects of the story. I think any one
>who sees any deeper resemblance to Harry and Christ beyond the
>subtle and symbolic, is adding a lot more to the story than
>is actually there.

No.Limberger responds:
Exactly.

>bboyminn wrote:
>Harry, in my view, is only Christ-like in the sense that nearly
>every hero's story tells a Christ-like tale.

No.Limberger responds:
Exactly.

As I have previously indicated, there is no harm in viewing
Harry Potter as a "Christ-like figure" or "Christ-figure".  However,
Harry's life falls so far short of that described in the Christian
new testament of the life of Jesus that, yes, to see such a
strong parallel between Harry and Jesus can be a stretch. The
alternative is to so water down the definition of "Christ-figure" as
to make it apply to virtually anyone who has ever done any kind
of a heroic act, such as soldiers who were wounded or died in
battle in efforts to save others, policeman and firemen who
have done the same, Buddha, Frodo Baggins, Perseus,
Luke Skywalker, etc.  Since a difference that makes no difference
is no difference, use of the term "Christ-figure" in that context
is meaningless.  Otherwise, the bar is raised so high that only
Jesus qualifies.  Additionally, to have such a watered-down
definition of "Christ-figure", imo, can potentially reduce the
value of the the new testament stories of Jesus that
Christians hold dear.

What makes the stories about Harry and Jesus (as well as
every other mythic, religious and fictional hero) have similar
elements is that each is a variant of the common "hero's journey".

Now, let us consider some of the differences between Harry's
life and the life of Jesus as described in the Christian new
testament.  Was Harry born of a virgin as Jesus was?  No,
Harry is clearly the son of James and Lily Potter.  At the time
of Harry's birth was he visited by three magi, was there a new
star in the sky, or were there heavenly angels visiting wizards
to tell them that a wizard savior had been born to parallel
similar stories about the birth of Jesus?  No.  Did Harry at
age 12 visit the Ministry of Magic and impress all of the
wizards there with his abilities to parallel what Jesus is
told to have done at age 12 when visiting the Jewish temple
in Jerusalem and discussing religious matters with the priests?
No, in Harry's second year at Hogwarts, he was initially
accused of having opened the chamber of secrets and
terrorizing everyone.  Was Jesus mistreated as a child and
made to live under a staircase as Harry was forced to do by
the Dursleys for the first 11 years of his life?  No.  Did Harry
ever walk on water as Jesus is reported to have done in the
new testament? No. Did Harry ever feed thousands with food
enough for one as Jesus is reported to have done with loaves
and fishes?  No. Did Harry ever use magic to raise anyone
from the dead to parallel stories of Jesus claiming that he
raised people from the dead?  No, but he clearly would have
done so given how much he missed his parents and godfather
who was killed by Bellatrix.  Does Harry ever give long speeches
about how wizards should live similar to how Jesus is
supposed to have preached to thousands?  No.  Did
Harry teach anyone how to pray as Jesus is said to
have done? No.  Was Harry crucified?  No.  Was Harry
made to wear a crown of thorns and declared to be
"king of the WW"?  No.  Did Jesus ever use his powers
to curse anyone or cause them physical pain as Harry
attempted to do when he attempted to use the cruciatous
curse?  No.  Was Jesus flawed, did he ever fall in love with
a girl or kiss a girl as Harry did?  No.  Was Jesus upset
throughout his formative years because his parents were
killed like Harry's?  No.

IMO, the differences between Harry and Jesus far outweigh
the similarities when it comes to comparing them beyond
those elements in common as described by "the hero's journey".
If people want to view Harry as being "Christ-like" or a
"Christ-figure", that is a personal choice.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Tue May  5 17:35:50 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 17:35:50 -0000
Subject: MAGICkal elITE - The Boy, The Man, The Hero, the Saint.
In-Reply-To: <7ef72f90905050743w5b09fe91xb6c6d9fdb65375e4@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <gtptdm+6ldr@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186435

No.Limberger wrote:
> <snip>
> 
> As I have previously indicated, there is no harm in viewing Harry Potter as a "Christ-like figure" or "Christ-figure".  However, Harry's life falls so far short of that described in the Christian new testament of the life of Jesus that, yes, to see such a strong parallel between Harry and Jesus can be a stretch. The alternative is to so water down the definition of "Christ-figure" as to make it apply to virtually anyone who has ever done any kind of a heroic act, such as soldiers who were wounded or died in battle in efforts to save others, policeman and firemen who have done the same, Buddha, Frodo Baggins, Perseus, Luke Skywalker, etc.  Since a difference that makes no difference is no difference, use of the term "Christ-figure" in that context is meaningless.  Otherwise, the bar is raised so high that only Jesus qualifies.  Additionally, to have such a watered-down definition of "Christ-figure", imo, can potentially reduce the value of the the new testament stories of Jesus that Christians hold dear.
> 
> What makes the stories about Harry and Jesus (as well as every other mythic, religious and fictional hero) have similar elements is that each is a variant of the common "hero's journey".
> 
> Now, let us consider some of the differences between Harry's life and the life of Jesus as described in the Christian new testament.  Was Harry born of a virgin as Jesus was?  No,Harry is clearly the son of James and Lily Potter.  At the time of Harry's birth was he visited by three magi, was there a new star in the sky, or were there heavenly angels visiting wizards to tell them that a wizard savior had been born to parallel similar stories about the birth of Jesus?  <snip>

> IMO, the differences between Harry and Jesus far outweigh the similarities when it comes to comparing them beyond those elements in common as described by "the hero's journey". If people want to view Harry as being "Christ-like" or a "Christ-figure", that is a personal choice.

>
Carol responds:
I certainly agree that Harry is not Christ, but I have yet to encounter anyone who claims that he is. And I agree that viewing Harry as a Christ figure or not is a personal preference (as is viewing Harry from the perspective of "the hero's journey"). But, as I've said repeatedly, a Christ *figure* is a common literary motif which is different from an allegorical representation of Christ (e.g., Aslan). 

You're trying to make the definition of Christ figure identical with Christ himself, which no literary critic using the term would do. Of course, Harry doesn't fit your definition. He isn't Christ. A Christ figure, as any literary critic would tell you, resembles Christ in certain significant ways, not in every way or even most ways. He (or she) is often an ordinary person who sacrifices himself to save others and/or experiences some sort of resurrection or return to earthly life (both Gandalf and Harry qualify as Christ figures by this definition though admittedly Gandalf is not an ordinary person. As I have already pointed out, "Christ figure" is not identical to hero, either in the sense of everyday hero or epic hero. Firemen who die in the line of duty saving someone else do not reappear on earth after having experienced some sort of resurrection, and epic heroes who have visited the Underworld and returned have not died to get there.Harry, of course, does not literally die, but he does, for the second time, survive a Killing Curse, he does experience the first stage of the journey to whatever is beyond earthly life, and he could have chosen to "go on"--that is, to die without returning. His is a symbolic resurrection, certainly, but it's nevertheless, in Dead!Dumbledore's word, "real."

No virgin birth is necessary for a literary character to be interpreted as a Christ figure. No walking on water is necessary. No magi are necessary (though it's rather likely that the newborn Harry was visited by three wizards named Lupin, Black, and Pettigrew). no crown of thorns is necessary. Ad infinitum. Conversely, no critic who interprets a literary hero as a Christ figure works backwards to argue that Christ didn't experience the elements of the hero's life. Of course, he didn't. He experienced the life of a Jewish boy and man in Palestine during the early days of the Roman Empire. That's completely irrelevant to the Christ figure argument. (Harry's being raised by unloving stepparents is a folklore motif, not an element of the Christ figure pattern, FWIW.)



And I have yet to hear any Christian complain that a Christ figure "waters down" the concept of Christ. In fact, Christians are supposed to attempt to be Christlike as far as possible, especially in forgiving those who wrong them (Harry forgiving Ron and DD and Snape and even Wormtail). We could also, probably, show Harry as a "Christian figure" like the Pilgrim in "Pilgrim's Progress" though not so obviously allegorical, journeying toward forgiveness of others and an understanding that death is not the end of all things. Again, it's just one way of exploring and applying the Christian motifs that are present in the stories, especially DH.

We can call Dumbledore a Merlin figure and draw parallels showing resemblances between the two, intentional or otherwise. (I think they're intentional.) That does not make Dumbledore Merlin. By the same token, the (intentional) resemblances between Harry and Christ do not make Harry Christ, nor do they eliminate the possibility of other interpretations, including Harry as Everyman and Harry as epic hero.

*Of course*, Harry in some ways fits the pattern of the hero's journey, which, IIRC, JKR has said that she's familiar with. The old mentor, she says, has to die. We could go through all the other stages, too, and see how well they fit. But showing that the HP books conform to one familiar pattern does not tell us everything that we can learn by examining the books. There are other, equally valid, ways to look at it, one of which is Christ figure. We understand that Harry is not Christ. We understand that you reject the concept of Christ figure as you have chosen to define it. Your definition, however, is not the one that literary critics use, and arguing that Harry can't walk on water or that no new star appeared in the sky at his birth does not eliminate the parallels that do exist, including the appellation Chosen One. You can, if you choose, compare Harry to mythic heroes who fulfill a prophecy. That's perfectly legitimate. But so is the Christ figure interpretation when the definition of Christ figure is not distorted to be equivalent to Christ himself.

That JKR intended DH to incorporate Christian themes of some kind is evident from the second epigraph to that book, the one by William Penn. That she also intended classical themes and parallels is evident from the first epigraph, the one from Aeschylus. (Placing the epigraph from Aeschylus first may seem to make it more important, but most debaters save their best arguments for last, knowing that what comes last is most likely to be remembered.)

My point is that no one interpretation, no one way of looking at the books, will tell us everything that we can know or understand about them. Some interpretations will appeal to some readers more than others. (For example, I have no interest in alchemical or Freudian interpretations, but I'm not going to call them invalid if they're supported by canon just because they examine aspects of the books that I'd rather ignore. I can just imagine a Freudian having a field day with Hermione using a phallic Basilisk fang to destroy the "feminine" cup. That sort of interpretation leaves me cold, just as the Christ figure interpretation does for you.)

Can you refresh our memories regarding the "hero's journey" and how it applies to Harry? It's been awhile since I read Joseph Campbell or since anyone on that list discussed that topic. What can Campbell add to our understanding of Harry's growth and development (which can also be viewed from the standpoint of the Bildungsroman)? IOW, rather than redefining "Christ figure" and in so doing turning your argument into a straw man fallacy, how about ignoring the interpretation you reject and supporting your own?

Carol, reiterating that any interpretation that can be supported by canon is a valid interpretation whether or not we agree with it




From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Tue May  5 18:48:09 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 18:48:09 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtnt2g+2irg@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtq1l9+bmer@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186436

> > Montavilla47:
> > 
> > May I offer an alternative interpretation?  We have only Dumbledore's and 
> > Lupin's word that Snape carried a grudge against James "all those years" 
> > because of  their school days/the Prank. In Dumbedore's case, we know he 
> > was lying, and in Lupin's case, he could easily be mistaken.
> 
> jkoney:
> Actually we have Snape's actions to show us that he held a grudge against a dead man. It starts with the celebrity comment the first day of class and ends with the filthy father comment at the end of HBP.

> If he wasn't still holding a grudge why would he start on Harry the first day of class? Why would he bring up his father while they were fighting?
> 

Montavilla47:

Since we've already debated the "celebrity" line to death, I'll limit myself
here to noting that Harry is a celebrity in his own right and his celebrity
is only linked to James in that Harry survived Voldemort's attack and
James did not.  

As far as the "filthy father" line at the end of HBP, I would argue that
this is more based on Harry's actions at the moment,  and less about 
Snape worrying about James using them twenty years earlier. 

But even if Snape is angry because Harry reminds him of James in both
instances, there's nothing to show that Snape was crippled by that 
grudge in the ten years between James's death and Harry's arrival
at Hogwarts.  If anything, he was probably more upset about being
turned down for the D.A.D.A. job each year.


> 
> 
> > Montavilla47
> > So, I don't hold that Snape wastes his life by holding grudges
> > against dead people (who are dead and thus couldn't care less
> > what he's doing).  If his life is wasted, it's wasted because he's
> > keeping to a promise he made when he was suicidally depressed.
> > Or, alternately, that he inadvertently set a murderer on the 
> > woman he loved, after losing her friendship due to his racist
> > views.
> > 
> > But it wasn't about James at all.  Compared to his relationship
> > with Lily and his mission towards Voldemort, the Marauders were
> > very small potatoes.
> > 

> jkoney:
> He didn't totally waste his life, but he also didn't do much with it until he was needed as a spy.
> 
> He was never able to reach out to his students and actually teach them, unless they were highly motivated. He had a decade before Harry arrived and it doesn't seem like he did much in that time period.
> 

Montavilla47:

I agree to disagree with you here.  In the first day of class, Snape informs his 
students that he expects them to work to a high standard like *all his
previous classes*.  Later, Umbridge notes that his students perform well
above average.  In HBP, we see (assuming that the class of '97 contains
40 students) that a quarter of his students achieved Outstanding marks
on their O.W.L.s.  This indicates to me that, although Harry hates Snape
with a burning passion, that a fair number of Snape's students thrive 
under his tutelage.

If Snape was wasting the ten years between Voldemort's fall and Harry's
arrival at Hogwarts, then so was Professors McGonagall, Flitwick, and Sprout,
since they were doing pretty much the same things he was.


> jkoney:
> The grudge against the Marauders may have been small potato's but that doesn't mean it still didn't exist and influence his actions.

Montavilla47:

Right.  But it was still small potatoes.  

The thing is, I think we are meant, after the Prince's Tale, to re-intrepret 
the scenes where Snape's motivation appears to be based on that 
"school boy grudge."  Mind you, a lot of us jumped the gun on that,
theorizing years before DH came out that Snape's anger in the Shrieking
Shack came from his belief that Sirius had betrayed Lily.  

But my point is, it makes sense to re-examine Snape's motivations,
just like it does to do so in GoF after we discover that Moody is actually
an evil impostor, or in PoA, after we discover that Sirius is innocent of 
betraying the Potters to Voldemort.









From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Tue May  5 19:00:04 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 19:00:04 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtq1l9+bmer@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtq2bk+6c18@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186437

> 
> Montavilla47:
<SNIP>
> > As far as the "filthy father" line at the end of HBP, I would argue that
> this is more based on Harry's actions at the moment,  and less about 
> Snape worrying about James using them twenty years earlier. 
> 
> But even if Snape is angry because Harry reminds him of James in both
> instances, there's nothing to show that Snape was crippled by that 
> grudge in the ten years between James's death and Harry's arrival
> at Hogwarts.  If anything, he was probably more upset about being
> turned down for the D.A.D.A. job each year.
> <SNIP>
>> But my point is, it makes sense to re-examine Snape's motivations,
> just like it does to do so in GoF after we discover that Moody is actually
> an evil impostor, or in PoA, after we discover that Sirius is innocent of 
> betraying the Potters to Voldemort.
>


Alla:

I know I argued in my previous post that I agree that both interpretations are possible as to why Snape outed Lupin, but I do think that in general for your interpretation to stand it just requires to dismiss too many characters' testimony. Dumbledore was hiding truth, Lupin was mistaken, Sirius was what? Sorry do not remember.

And here we have Snape itself, still remembering Harry's "filfy father" using his curses against him while said father had been dead for more than twenty years and Snape is still sputtering rage to his son.

So Snape really does not mean that?

Oh and to clarify, I certainly agree that Lily was a huge motivation for Snape's actions, of course I cannot dismiss it, but to me precisely because Lily is such a huge part, I can never say that his grudge against James was small potato.

To me those words in HBP persuaded me beyond any doubt that yes, Snape  is hating a dead man that much and yes, he projects it on his son that much. After DH I just had the missing part of the puzzle (suspected but certainly was not sure at all before) - that said dead man dared to win Lily's love. And of course he used Snape's curses against him and dared to save his life. 

And before you or anybody asks me what exactly is wrong with holding a grudge against people who treated Snape as they did in SWM scene, I will say - NOTHING, absolutely nothing.

I mean, I highly suspect that JKR thinks that it goes against christian forgiveness and all that, but personally I think Snape has every right to his grudges, we can't help how we feel. As long as he would have hold his grudge to his despicable self (IMO) in his dungeons, I would not have said a word against him.

I take objection to the argument that he does not hold said grudges, that's all.

JMO,

Alla




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Tue May  5 19:11:48 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 19:11:48 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12
In-Reply-To: <gtnu45+f6d5@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtq31k+bo1t@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186438

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
<SNIP>
> Up to the moment when Dumbledore confesses, JKR doesn't tell us in DH when  her good characters are doing bad things. She wants us to choose what is right, being critical of people whom we would like to admire, rather than what is easy,  supposing that whatever the good guys do must be okay. But as you said, the cruciatus curse is so obviously wrong that unless you have a different set of moral standards for fictional people than for real ones, it would be very hard to approve of it.


Alla:

This was lovely post Pippin and I do not really disagree with anything you wrote including what I snipped. 

But the reason I brought this incident here is not to decide what I think about it, but because I was sort of surprised at my reactions. I am sure you know that while  for example I certainly agree that Harry's Cruciatus is wrong, I really find it completely excusable( again let me repeat - excusable, not right). There are also several other incidents throughout the books that I completely excuse and still I never got the impression that I consider Harry and Co to be doing only good things, so I was thinking, eh, where are those things that I want to slap them for? I know they must be there somewhere.

And this one shocked me **badly**, just as I discovered on the reread that Harry and Ginny good bye scene shocked me in a good way. I mean, I remembered it, but again, certainly do not remember having any strong reaction one way or another, you know?

And as I said, I think I figured out that I am excusing the reaction to provocation, you know and am more angry as to things being done to people who did nothing, if that makes sense?

But that again, I think goes back to your paragraph that I left unsnipped, I mean things are just as bad, provocation or not, it is just easier for the reader (me only) to go with the provocation and excuse it? Or not, I do not know, just thinking out loud.

Alla 




From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Tue May  5 19:30:53 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 19:30:53 -0000
Subject: MAGICkal elITE - The Boy, The Man, The Hero, the Saint.
In-Reply-To: <gtptdm+6ldr@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtq45d+i34q@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186439

I'm responding to both /No Limberger/ and to /Carol/, though I
probably won't make a distinction in my post.

To No Limberger (cool name), I agree with Carol that it is 
incorrect to make such direct comparisons between Harry and
Christ. Though, I will add that doing so in the context of your
post was valid. But, it establishes what we all seem to agree
on, that Harry is not literally or allegorically Christ.

Next to terminology, to say 'Christ Figure' in the context of
Harry, is too strong a statement for my taste, though I concede
it is mostly a shorthand or generalized comment when used in 
literary discussion. But to me it implies at least an allegorical
similarity. I think that is far too strong for Harry. 

Next is the term 'Christ-like', again frequently used as a 
generalization, but still to me it implies too strong of a 
parallel. 

So, the best I can say, is that there are subtle and symbolic
parallels in Harry's story, as there are in most Hero's stories.

Even though I am more of a spiritual person than a hard core
Christian, I'm still somewhat turned off by too strong an
implication in the use of 'Christ-like' or 'Christ-Figure',
while at the same time knowing that these are common 
generalizations used in literary discussion. 

So, my underlying points, especially for those who have strong
Christian leanings, is don't take these references to 'Christ'
too seriously. While far more accurate, saying 'a subtle and
symbolically literary Christ-like figure' is far more difficult
and tedious to write over and over again. 

That was the point I was trying to make to Geoff, to not take 
these 'Christ' references too literally or too seriously, they
are merely shorthand for much more subtle implication. 

I think from a literary perspective, it is amazing that JKR
could so thoroughly make Harry an 'everyman' in the most
classic and traditional sense, yet make him so noble and heroic
in the most extraordinary way. And we can't deny the themes of
symbolic and literal death and rebirth in the series. We also
can't deny the self-sacrifice aspect of the story. 

And in that, JKR has created a compelling character, one in 
which the littlest kid can see himself reflected, and yet in
a way that even adults can understand and identify with. 

In many discussions, people have complained at how imperfect
Harry was, he shouldn't have done this, he shouldn't have done
that, but I think that imperfection is the very thing we see
reflected in ourselves. Harry doesn't always know what to do
or what is right, so like us everyday people, he blunders and,
like us ordinary people, more often than not, he gets it right.

So, we know and love Harry (and friends) both because they
are 'everyman' and are also 'heroic'. In a sense, the stories
leave us feeling that if Harry can do it, if Ron can do it,
if Nevile can do, then so can we. I've read countless stories
of young kids who were inspired to do the right thing, to 
make better choices because of Harry and friends. 

Just as some people ask, What would Jesus do? Some also ask
themselves, What would Harry do? Harry is inspiration to do
the right and noble thing even if you are a flawed human
being. And that seems to be the same with Jesus, he doesn't 
expect us to be saints, but when the chips are down and it
really counts, he expects us to choose what is right over
what is easy. He expects us to aspire to heroic nobility. 

So, yes, there are valid parallels to be drawn between the
two, but, like many others, I feel uncomfortable with 
language that draws the parallels too literally, even if it
is only implied. 

Still, I stay my discomfort because I know a larger portion
of that comparative language is very generalized and not
meant to be taken literally.

Sorry for rambling on on such a tangential point.

Steve/bboyminn




From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Tue May  5 21:00:06 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 21:00:06 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtq2bk+6c18@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtq9cm+7lsh@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186440

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
>
> > 
> > Montavilla47:
> <SNIP>
> > > As far as the "filthy father" line at the end of HBP, I would argue that
> > this is more based on Harry's actions at the moment,  and less about 
> > Snape worrying about James using them twenty years earlier. 
> > 
> > But even if Snape is angry because Harry reminds him of James in both
> > instances, there's nothing to show that Snape was crippled by that 
> > grudge in the ten years between James's death and Harry's arrival
> > at Hogwarts.  If anything, he was probably more upset about being
> > turned down for the D.A.D.A. job each year.
> > <SNIP>
> >> But my point is, it makes sense to re-examine Snape's motivations,
> > just like it does to do so in GoF after we discover that Moody is actually
> > an evil impostor, or in PoA, after we discover that Sirius is innocent of 
> > betraying the Potters to Voldemort.
> >
> 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> I know I argued in my previous post that I agree that both interpretations are possible as to why Snape outed Lupin, but I do think that in general for your interpretation to stand it just requires to dismiss too many characters' testimony. Dumbledore was hiding truth, Lupin was mistaken, Sirius was what? Sorry do not remember.

Montavilla47:

Yeah, I don't remember Sirius saying much about Snape holding a grudge
at all.  He simply seems to dislike Snape, as Snape does him.  

But the thing is, Alla, we KNOW that Dumbledore is hiding the truth
because we see Dumbledore promise Snape that he will do just that.  
What Snape doesn't know when he demands that promise is that 
Dumbledore will hide the truth by telling Harry something that Snape
considers humiliating.

And yes, Lupin was mistaken.  That's never stated implicitly, but 
it's pretty obvious after reading the Prince's Tale.

I think there's a lot more canon evidence that Snape's blow-up
in the Shack was based on his belief that Sirius told Voldemort
how to find the Potters than there is, say, for the idea that 
the Slytherin students came back to fight the Death Eaters in the 
final battle.

Alla:
> And here we have Snape itself, still remembering Harry's "filfy father" using his curses against him while said father had been dead for more than twenty years and Snape is still sputtering rage to his son.

Montavilla47:
You're right that Snape is sputtering in rage there--well, declaiming like
a bad Shakespearean tragedian in rage is more like it, but in any case,
Snape has a whole lot of reasons to be angry in that scene.  He's just
discovered that Draco has managed--despite all Snape's efforts--to
sneak in a gang of Death Eaters to wreak havoc in the castle.  He's 
just had to kill Dumbledore--something he didn't want to do.  And
he's now being chased by the whippersnapper "Chosen One" who 
keeps trying to throw his own spells at him (which, as far as Snape
knows, were obtained by lying, stealing, and cheating).  

Snape, by throwing in James here, is no more showing a grudge 
against James than Harry did when he threw James into Snape's
face back in PoA.  

Snape has no reason to need any grudge against James to fuel
his rage at this moment.  He's got all the ammunition he needs,
including his anger at Harry.  Who is right there and not dead.


Alla:
> I mean, I highly suspect that JKR thinks that it goes against christian forgiveness and all that, but personally I think Snape has every right to his grudges, we can't help how we feel. As long as he would have hold his grudge to his despicable self (IMO) in his dungeons, I would not have said a word against him.
> 
> I take objection to the argument that he does not hold said grudges, that's all.

Montavilla47:
The original statement that I reacted to was on that Snape 
"wasted his life" holding grudges against dead people, who, as
Pippin nicely put it, were happy in their deadness and couldn't
care less that Snape was stewing about their days at school.

I rather like the sentiment.  I mean, that's quite a nice
message to give in a story.  But I just don't think that it's 
necessarily what really happened in the books.

I'm not saying that Snape doesn't hold grudges.  He obviously
held them against Harry--who responded in kind until he 
realized what Snape's true motivations were.  

But I don't see him holding a grudge against the dead 
Sirius and the "grudge-holding" against James only comes
out in relation to Harry--which means that the ninety
percent of his world that doesn't have to do with 
Harry is probably free of any James grudging at all.








From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Tue May  5 21:34:21 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 21:34:21 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12
In-Reply-To: <gtnu45+f6d5@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtqbct+erem@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186441

> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214@> wrote:
> 
> > But here? Hermione dear just made the person violently sick by force feeding him candy he wanted no part of (HA, good sense he has), of course with Ron and Harry's approval, do not think that I am letting them off the hook here, they discussed the plan together. The person did nothing to them except having a misfortune to be somebody they decided to impersonate. And when this poor guy leans on Hermione she has a nerve  to look repulsed when she made him so sick in the first place. Ugh, very big slap Hermione moment for me, and slap Harry and Ron too of course.
> 
> Pippin:
> As with the cruciatus curse, the moral argument is not in DH because it was given already. 
> 
> Hermione is the one who made such a fuss in OOP over Fred and George testing the pastilles on first years, though they  at least had consented and were getting compensated too.  She's got to be at least as wrong here as Fred and George were then.
> 

Montavilla47:
I would say she's more wrong, since Fred and George did at least obtain
consent from their victims.  (Although, of course, consent from an eleven
year old victim would not hold up in court.)


Pippin:
> If Voldemort had ordered Hermione to poison an innocent person, I'm sure she would have died first. But DH is all about the way that people with decent values who would never give in to threats or blackmail can temporarily lose their moral compass through distraction  or emotional upheaval. 
> 
> IMO, JKR doesn't give us a moment where Hermione questions what's happened to her values, because nothing has happened to them. 
> 
>   In the Potterverse, IMO, your values are a part of you, for better or for worse. They do change, but you can't change them like you'd change your shirt, in no time or with little effort. It isn't as easy for Draco to become a killer as the innocent believe, but he can't easily become a hero either.  
> 
> Hermione's values are the same as they ever were, IMO. She didn't change her ideas about good and evil, it just got too difficult to keep them in mind, much less live up to them.

Montavilla47:
So, what I think you are saying here is that Hermione is doing what 
is easy, rather than what is right?  I think we might found that 
elusive example we were searching for earlier!


Pippin:
> The moral discussion of the cruciatus curse is in GoF, where Sirius opines (summarizing) that Crouch may have been a good man once, but he authorized the aurors to use unforgivable curses against Death Eaters and condemned people without trial. 
> 
> Now, that's just what Harry did when he punished Amycus. 
> 
> So, by Sirius's standards, Harry wasn't being good while he did those things. But did Harry, as Sirius believes of Crouch, become as cruel and ruthless as a Death Eater? Or was Sirius wrong, too innocent  to understand?
> 
> The question GoF didn't answer was how Barty, who was always vehemently anti-Dark Arts, could feel that fighting fire with fire was okay. In DH we got the answer: the infamous greater good. It's a tricky argument, because "the greater good" is a valid moral position: it is generally accepted that laws are made to serve the common good, and not the other way round. 
> 
> One could argue that fighting fire with fire is a necessary evil -- that's what Barty seems to have thought. But IMO McGonagall gives us JKR's verdict on that line of reasoning: it's foolish. 

Montavilla47:
I would agree with you that that was JKR's verdict, except that 
McGonagall immediately uses an Unforgiveable Curse on Amycus
herself.  If JKR is making an argument that stooping to your enemy's
level is "foolish," she is seriously undermining that argument in this
instance.

And this instance is the only place where that "foolish" statement
comes in at all.  Although, Ron does mention that Hermione is 
using defensive spells (Muffliato) that she condemned in HBP.

It seems as though JKR is saying, in direct contradiction to what
Sirius said in GoF, that dark times call for dark methods and that
Barty, Sr. was actually right to authorize the use of Unforgivables.

Pippin:
Because unless you are indeed as cruel and ruthless as a Death Eater, they are always going to win at that game, just as Barty Sr's moments of mercy led to Barty Jr's escape. And that won't serve the greater good at all.
> 
> Harry doesn't need anyone to point this out to him -- he's lived it all. 
> 
> Up to the moment when Dumbledore confesses, JKR doesn't tell us in DH when  her good characters are doing bad things. She wants us to choose what is right, being critical of people whom we would like to admire, rather than what is easy,  supposing that whatever the good guys do must be okay. But as you said, the cruciatus curse is so obviously wrong that unless you have a different set of moral standards for fictional people than for real ones, it would be very hard to approve of it.

Montavilla47:

I like that idea, Pippin.  But I just don't see it.  What I really 
get from the books is that the good guys are good--they 
only do bad things because the bad guys made them.  So, 
the fact that they do bad things doesn't reflect badly on them.

Which is exactly the kind of double-think that's common
in action-adventure films.  When the villain kills people,
it's evil, it's murder, and he'll eventually go to hell.  When
the hero kills the villain (and dozen henchmen before that),
it's simply justice.

If JKR is trying to subvert the genre, then she needs to 
do a better job of letting us know that.  Otherwise, we'll
just assume she's following it.










From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Tue May  5 21:36:44 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 21:36:44 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtq9cm+7lsh@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtqbhc+6odh@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186442

Montavilla47:
But the thing is, Alla, we KNOW that Dumbledore is hiding the truth
because we see Dumbledore promise Snape that he will do just that.
What Snape doesn't know when he demands that promise is that
Dumbledore will hide the truth by telling Harry something that Snape
considers humiliating. <SNIP>

Alla:

Yes, we know that Dumbledore is hiding the truth from Harry that Snape loved his mother. We also never in the books as far I can remember at least hear Dumbledore say direct lie ? lie by omissions a plenty of course, but never something that did not happen. So I do not see how what Dumbledore says about James and Snape is proven to be a lie, you know?

Montavilla47:
<SNIP>
Snape, by throwing in James here, is no more showing a grudge
against James than Harry did when he threw James into Snape's
face back in PoA.

Alla:

I am confused. Snape talking about James in PoA is not showing a grudge, but Harry is showing grudge when he is talking about James? Against whom? Against James? 

Montavilla 47:

Snape has no reason to need any grudge against James to fuel
his rage at this moment. He's got all the ammunition he needs,
including his anger at Harry. Who is right there and not dead.


Alla:

You are right, Snape has a lot of reasons to be angry in this scene, however the reasons he **says** that he is angry about are :
a)	Harry is using his spells against him;
b)	 His filfy father was using his spells against him.

There are no other reasons that Snape gives us that he is angry about. So I guess I am asking why you would substitute the reasons that he gives for other reasons .
I mean, sure Snape has no NEED to feel a rage against James, but he says that he does and well, it is good enough for me.

I mean, maybe I am concentrating too much on one quote, but I am really not. I mean, I totally get why it is desirable that Snape does not hold grudges, that it makes him nobler person and even though I was always convinced that he does and still convinced, I certainly am willing to entertain the possibility that it was a red herring, if canon is being shoved down my throat. But so far you are just arguing that what characters said do not really mean what they say, no? And you have absolute right to your intepretation of course.

But I just do not see that after DH.  Snape Loved Lily and fought Voldemort ? for sure, but where does it say that he did not hate James, I do not know. I think this quote showed that really it was not a misdirection, that loved Lily as he did, he was that  person who was willing to spend his life hating a dead man who had a nerve to win Lily and save his life. Again, please show me where does it say that Snape did not hate James when he was alive and when he was dead. 

Montavilla47:
<SNIP>
> I'm not saying that Snape doesn't hold grudges.  He obviously
> held them against Harry--who responded in kind until he 
> realized what Snape's true motivations were.  

Alla:

And I am saying that Snape's grudge against Harry was because he looked like James and was son of Lily.

Montavilla47: 
> But I don't see him holding a grudge against the dead 
> Sirius and the "grudge-holding" against James only comes
> out in relation to Harry--which means that the ninety
> percent of his world that doesn't have to do with 
> Harry is probably free of any James grudging at all.

Alla:

To whom else it supposed to come out? Of course it comes out with relation to Harry, poor kid has a nerve to look like James. We do not know if Snape mentions his grudge to James to outside world, if he has any friends besides DE there, maybe he does? We just do not know IMO.

I think that if you take Snape's ability to hold grudges from him, I really do not think he will be same character, but again my opinion.

JMO,
Alla





From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Tue May  5 22:51:39 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 22:51:39 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtqbhc+6odh@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtqftr+snbc@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186443

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
>
> Montavilla47:
> But the thing is, Alla, we KNOW that Dumbledore is hiding the truth
> because we see Dumbledore promise Snape that he will do just that.
> What Snape doesn't know when he demands that promise is that
> Dumbledore will hide the truth by telling Harry something that Snape
> considers humiliating. <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Yes, we know that Dumbledore is hiding the truth from Harry that Snape loved his mother. We also never in the books as far I can remember at least hear Dumbledore say direct lie ? lie by omissions a plenty of course, but never something that did not happen. So I do not see how what Dumbledore says about James and Snape is proven to be a lie, you know?
> 
> Montavilla47:
> <SNIP>
> Snape, by throwing in James here, is no more showing a grudge
> against James than Harry did when he threw James into Snape's
> face back in PoA.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> I am confused. Snape talking about James in PoA is not showing a grudge, but Harry is showing grudge when he is talking about James? Against whom? Against James? 


Montavilla47:

I didn't say that Harry was showing a grudge against James.
I'm showing an example of  Harry throwing James into Snape's 
face in PoA, even though it would be absurd for Harry to be 
holding a grudge against his dead father.

I'm doing that to support my contention that using A in an 
argument against B does not necessarily mean that you're
holding a grudge against A.  It can mean any number of 
things, including that it's an effective bit of ammunition.


> 
> Montavilla 47:
> 
> Snape has no reason to need any grudge against James to fuel
> his rage at this moment. He's got all the ammunition he needs,
> including his anger at Harry. Who is right there and not dead.
> 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> You are right, Snape has a lot of reasons to be angry in this scene, however the reasons he **says** that he is angry about are :
> a)	Harry is using his spells against him;
> b)	 His filfy father was using his spells against him.

Montavilla47:

Well, it's not like Snape can stop and explain to Harry
that what he's really upset about at the moment is the
fact that he was forced to kill the one person who didn't
consider him scum.

Alla:
> There are no other reasons that Snape gives us that he is angry about. So I guess I am asking why you would substitute the reasons that he gives for other reasons .

> I mean, sure Snape has no NEED to feel a rage against James, but he says that he does and well, it is good enough for me.

Montavilla47:
Well, for one thing, they would give away that big "Snape isn't
evil" twist that JKR is setting up for DH.  In other words, this is 
deliberate misdirection on the part of the author--with the 
hint about Snape looking like he's in pain while he's shouting
it.  That's clues us in that what Snape is really upset about isn't
Harry's feeble attempts to duel him.  

Alla:
> I mean, maybe I am concentrating too much on one quote, but I am really not. I mean, I totally get why it is desirable that Snape does not hold grudges, that it makes him nobler person and even though I was always convinced that he does and still convinced, I certainly am willing to entertain the possibility that it was a red herring, if canon is being shoved down my throat. But so far you are just arguing that what characters said do not really mean what they say, no? And you have absolute right to your intepretation of course.
>

Montavilla47:
I think it's a bit too hard to argue Snape as a noble character--
in the sense of being forgiving or magnamious.  I don't see him 
as being forgiving at all--least of all to himself.  But if you don't 
re-examine his character in light of the Prince's Tale, then you're 
holding onto a false interpretation of his character.  The whole 
point of the Prince's Tale is to  change our view of Snape.  


Alla:
> But I just do not see that after DH.  Snape Loved Lily and fought Voldemort ? for sure, but where does it say that he did not hate James, I do not know. I think this quote showed that really it was not a misdirection, that loved Lily as he did, he was that  person who was willing to spend his life hating a dead man who had a nerve to win Lily and save his life. Again, please show me where does it say that Snape did not hate James when he was alive and when he was dead. 

Montavilla47:
There's no point where Snape says, "I do not hate James."  And there's 
no point where he says that he does.  But when Dumbledore scolds
Snape for not trying to save James or Harry from Voldemort, Snape's 
reaction is indifference.  Not anything about how he'd be happy 
if James died, or how James deserves it, or even how he much he
feels in James's debt about that saving his life thing.  James is 
*nothing* to him at that point.

Moreover, Snape denies in PoA that James was doing anything
but saving his own skin during the Prank.  He obviously feels
no debt at all to James about it.  Which makes what Dumbledore
told Harry a lie.


> Montavilla47:
> <SNIP>
> > I'm not saying that Snape doesn't hold grudges.  He obviously
> > held them against Harry--who responded in kind until he 
> > realized what Snape's true motivations were.  
> 
> Alla:
> 
> And I am saying that Snape's grudge against Harry was because he looked like James and was son of Lily.

Montavilla47:
Which, I think is a valid interpretation.  But it is only
an interpretation.  Nobody in the entire series ever states
or even implies that Snape is primarily thinking about 
Harry as the manifestation of James having sex with Lily.

I mean, it's an obvious reason to resent Harry's very 
existence--so I'm not going to deny it.  But nobody ever 
says that--and Harry is careful in his duel with Voldemort 
to stress that Snape loved Lily *as a friend.*

Not to say that Snape wouldn't have had a romantic 
relationship with Lily if she would have been willing--but 
it seems really clear to me that Snape knows that *he*
blew it with Lily.  It wasn't that James won her--it was
that Snape lost her.  

> 
> Montavilla47: 
> > But I don't see him holding a grudge against the dead 
> > Sirius and the "grudge-holding" against James only comes
> > out in relation to Harry--which means that the ninety
> > percent of his world that doesn't have to do with 
> > Harry is probably free of any James grudging at all.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> To whom else it supposed to come out? Of course it comes out with relation to Harry, poor kid has a nerve to look like James. We do not know if Snape mentions his grudge to James to outside world, if he has any friends besides DE there, maybe he does? We just do not know IMO.
> 
> I think that if you take Snape's ability to hold grudges from him, I really do not think he will be same character, but again my opinion.
> 

Montavilla47:
Well, a lot of the people in the books hold grudges.
Sirius, even when he's bent on killing Peter Pettigrew, has 
time to growl about how much he hates Snape.  (Who did
what to Sirius exactly?)

Most of the Weasleys hold their grudge against Percy
until the moment when he apologizes--something I 
find amazing considering that he's family.  Of course,
he seems to be holding his grudge, too.

Harry holds his grudge against Ron in GoF until Ron
apologizes  As of HBP, Harry is still holding a grudge
against Marietta.  He continues to hold a grudge against
Umbridge--he even extends his grudge to include
Scrimgeour.  I would guess that Harry would have 
continued the grudge against Scrimgeour if he hadn't
heard that Scrimgeour died protecting him.

So, I don't think Snape's ability to hold grudges
is that unique.  If it were the defining trait for his 
character then we'd be hard pressed to pull him
out of a crowd.








From alli.myatt at gmail.com  Tue May  5 22:49:33 2009
From: alli.myatt at gmail.com (wondaqueen)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 22:49:33 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12
In-Reply-To: <gtqbct+erem@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtqfpt+q0pd@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186444

 
> Montavilla47:
> 
> I like that idea, Pippin.  But I just don't see it.  What I really 
> get from the books is that the good guys are good--they 
> only do bad things because the bad guys made them.  So, 
> the fact that they do bad things doesn't reflect badly on them.
> 

wondaqueen:
I got something different from the books.  Through the first six books, I would have agreed with you; it was clear that the good guys were good and the bad guys were bad.  

But DH added a bit of complexity to the formula.  I think that JKR did a wonderful job of showing that people are complex - that no one is all good or all bad, as long as they still have a soul.  We learn that Dumbledore, who had been portrayed as this wise grandfather, was manipulating Harry and others.  Yes, he was manipulating for the greater good but he was manipulating them nonetheless.  And we learn characters like Snape and Narcissa Malfoy, who have been portrayed as bad throughout the series, have good in them and that they can make choices for good.  

What I took away from the books is that we shouldn't see people as purely good or bad. People are complex and it's in that complexity that we find the true story.

(BTW, this is my first post -- hi! -- so if I violated any of the (somewhat complicated) rules, I apologize.  I've thoroughly enjoyed reading the thoughtful posts.)

-Alli




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Tue May  5 23:19:52 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 23:19:52 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtqftr+snbc@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtqhio+7bdj@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186445

Montavilla47:

I didn't say that Harry was showing a grudge against James.
I'm showing an example of Harry throwing James into Snape's
face in PoA, even though it would be absurd for Harry to be
holding a grudge against his dead father.

I'm doing that to support my contention that using A in an
argument against B does not necessarily mean that you're
holding a grudge against A. It can mean any number of
things, including that it's an effective bit of ammunition.

Alla:

Ah, sorry misunderstood you. However Harry does not talk about his father in a bad light, that is why I would not think that he indeed holds grudge against him, Snape however says bad things about him and that to me makes an obvious example of holding grudges.

Alla:
>
> You are right, Snape has a lot of reasons to be angry in this scene, however
the reasons he **says** that he is angry about are :
> a) Harry is using his spells against him;
> b) His filfy father was using his spells against him.

Montavilla47:

Well, it's not like Snape can stop and explain to Harry
that what he's really upset about at the moment is the
fact that he was forced to kill the one person who didn't
consider him scum.

Alla:

Indeed, however it is not like if he does not say one of the reasons why he is upset, then another reason must be not true in my opinion. To me it is again, omission of the part of the truth.

Alla:
> There are no other reasons that Snape gives us that he is angry about. So I
guess I am asking why you would substitute the reasons that he gives for other
reasons .

> I mean, sure Snape has no NEED to feel a rage against James, but he says that
he does and well, it is good enough for me.

Montavilla47:
Well, for one thing, they would give away that big "Snape isn't
evil" twist that JKR is setting up for DH. In other words, this is
deliberate misdirection on the part of the author--with the
hint about Snape looking like he's in pain while he's shouting
it. That's clues us in that what Snape is really upset about isn't
Harry's feeble attempts to duel him.

Alla:

Or again, it could be that **part** of Snape's true motivations is concealed and another true part is seen. To be misdirection, something does not have to be a lie, it can just cover something else which we do not know yet, IMO.

Montavilla47:
<SNIP>
I think it's a bit too hard to argue Snape as a noble character--
in the sense of being forgiving or magnanimous. I don't see him
as being forgiving at all--least of all to himself. But if you don't
re-examine his character in light of the Prince's Tale, then you're
holding onto a false interpretation of his character. The whole
point of the Prince's Tale is to change our view of Snape.

Alla:

To me Prince's tale gave new information about Snape, it did not change his character completely at all.

So, if by false interpretation you mean that  I see Snape as a  man who hated James and his friends and by extension hated his son and who also loved Lily and wanted to atone for his guilt in her death, then absolutely I **am** holding to this interpretation. The only thing that changed for me after DH is that Snape was indeed working for Dumbledore and that he loved Lily.

Montavilla47:
<SNIP>
There's no point where Snape says, "I do not hate James." And there's
no point where he says that he does. But when Dumbledore scolds
Snape for not trying to save James or Harry from Voldemort, Snape's
reaction is indifference. Not anything about how he'd be happy
if James died, or how James deserves it, or even how he much he
feels in James's debt about that saving his life thing. James is
*nothing* to him at that point.

Alla:

To me him asking Dumbledore to provide safety for Lily and not for her husband and baby even though Snape was the one who set Voldemort on them was proof enough that he hated them, IMO of course. I mean, he wants Dumbledore to save Lily but says nothing about James, I make a conclusion that he wants James to die, IMO of course.

Montavilla47:
Moreover, Snape denies in PoA that James was doing anything
but saving his own skin during the Prank. He obviously feels
no debt at all to James about it. Which makes what Dumbledore
told Harry a lie.

Alla:

I do not see how one follows from another. Snape says that, yes, but where does he say that I feel no debt to James?

Montavilla47:
Not to say that Snape wouldn't have had a romantic
relationship with Lily if she would have been willing--but
it seems really clear to me that Snape knows that *he* blew it with Lily. It wasn't that James won her--it was
that Snape lost her.

Alla:

I do not have book with me right now, but Snape seemed awfully upset to me when Lily mentions James and Marauders and that she spents time with them. But I have to double check.
He knows that he lost her friendship, for sure. But I got from Prince memory that Snape saw that Lily was moving to Marauders way before their break up happened, IMO of course.

Alla:
<SNIP>
> I think that if you take Snape's ability to hold grudges from him, I really do
not think he will be same character, but again my opinion.
>

Montavilla47:
Well, a lot of the people in the books hold grudges.
<SNIP>
So, I don't think Snape's ability to hold grudges
is that unique. If it were the defining trait for his
character then we'd be hard pressed to pull him
out of a crowd.

Alla:

Absolutely, a lot of people do, I agree. I just find Snape's ability to do that to be how to put, very distinctive and strong? And long?





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Tue May  5 23:34:52 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 23:34:52 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12
In-Reply-To: <gtqbct+erem@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtqies+l9cb@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186446


> Montavilla47:
> 
> If JKR is trying to subvert the genre, then she needs to 
> do a better job of letting us know that.  Otherwise, we'll
> just assume she's following it.
>

Pippin:
She's told us that she's not following it, and doesn't particularly care for it. The work bears that out, IMO.

I don't think she's subverting the genre. She's re-inventing it to serve her purposes, one of which is to show us that the genre, the consensus fantasy universe, is just wrong about some things. 

Take the idea that once you step on to the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. There is no dark path in the Potterverse -- no Force or Ring of Power that compels the person who's made one bad choice to make another. You can rejoin the light any time -- provided you have the courage to realize that you made a mistake. And there doesn't necessarily have to be a bad consequence for you to realize that you made a mistake -- in the real world, people  learn from others' mistakes as well as their own. 

The danger, in JKR's world,  is not that doing evil things will erode your conscience until you are like Voldemort. The danger is that you won't realize how much damage you can do *without* being like Voldemort.

That a character criticizes someone and then does the exact same thing herself happens all the time in canon, no doubt illustrating the concept that it's easier to spot the speck in your neighbor's eye than a two-by-four in your own. 

What McGonagall does is just as foolish and hypocritical as what Harry did, and for the same reason: people are about to die for the right to be governed by laws instead of the whims of one person. What McGonagall's action does is show us *why* that right is worth dying for: because no individual, no matter how well-intentioned and well-behaved they are normally, can be trusted with that kind of power. 

McGonagall didn't do any great harm by her actions. Amycus and his sister no doubt lived to stand trial for their deeds. But then, no great harm was done by Dumbledore's flirtation with the Dark Arts, until there was. 


Pippin








From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Wed May  6 00:04:15 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 00:04:15 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtqbct+erem@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtqk5v+7q0i@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186447

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "montavilla47" <montavilla47 at ...> wrote:
>
> > ---  "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214@> wrote:
> > 
>> > But here? Hermione dear just made the person violently 
>> >sick by force feeding him candy he wanted no part of ..., 
>> >of course with Ron and Harry's approval, do not think that
>> > I am letting them off the hook here, they discussed the 
>> >plan together....
> > 
> > Pippin:
> > As with the cruciatus curse, the moral argument is not in DH
> > because it was given already. 
> > 
> > Hermione is the one who made such a fuss in OOP over Fred 
> > and George testing the pastilles on first years, ...
> > 
> 
> Montavilla47:
> I would say she's more wrong, since Fred and George did at 
> least obtain consent from their victims.  (Although, of 
> course, consent from an eleven year old victim would not hold
> up in court.)
> 
> 
> ...edited...

bboyminn:

You've heard the expression, if you want to make an omelet, 
you've got to crack a few eggs. 

People keep looking at these acts in isolation, but you much
view the context in which they are done. Actions are never
isolated from context. 

First, the Ministry person in question didn't get 'violently
sick', he was made to vomit, but he health was in no way 
compromised, and he wasn't harmed. Though admittedly he did
experience some unpleasantness. But to what end? 

Was this done as a mean spirited prank? Was this done with
casual disregard for other people? I don't think so, this 
was an action the very much had a purpose, a purpose that
served to counter the oppression and tyranny that was growing
in the Ministry and in the wizard world as the Death Eaters
gained more and more power.

This was the literal and moral equivalent of war. 

I suggest we go back and ask that wizard who was made to 
vomit if he thought his sufffering was worth the ultimate
and eventual removal of the Death Eaters from power. I
suspect, he is OK with it. 

As to Harry and McGonagall using Unforgivables, again we have
a context. The first context is WAR. The rules of conduct 
become less stringent in war time. After the Victory is
anyone clamoring for Harry and McGonagall to be convicted of
war crimes? No, because the understand the necessity in the
moment, and they understand the context and the extent to
which the curses were used. 

For the second framework of context, let us look at the 
underlying reason for the Unforgivables being unforgivable.
With the Cruciatus curse you can cause unbearable and somewhat
unlimited pain. Is that what Harry did? With the Imperious
curse you can force people to do unspeakable things against
their will. Is that what McGonagall did? No, in both cases.

Harry did not sustain the pain in a brutal and sadistic way.
It was one quick shot to save the people around him and himself.

McGonagall didn't force Amucus to do anything terrible, she 
simply convinced him to comply until she could get him 
immoblized and neutralize. 

Yes, these were technically Unforgivables, but they were done
in unusual circumstances and done with great restraint. 

In our society, shooting someone is unforgivable, it will 
earn you life in prison or worse, the death penalty. Yet,
unforgivable as shooting someone is, our society makes 
exceptions based on circumstances. It is unforgivable to
kill someone, except under this long list of mitigating 
circumstances and contexts. 

While in the case of Unforgivable Curse, we don't know that
mitigating are written into the law, nor do we know that it
is not. But we do know that the Wizard World has a somewhat
fast and loose frontier mentality when it comes to selective
interpretation of the law.

So, if the sick wizard isn't too fussed about it, and the
wizard world in general isn't too fussed about it, it would
seem that our outrage is somewhat misplaced. 

I'm reminded of how the media reacted when Joseph Biden 
referred to Obama as 'clean' (It was Biden, right?). The press
and the public, spurred on by media hype, were outraged. But 
the one and only person who mattered, Obama, wasn't offended,
upset, or outraged at all, because he rationally understood the
intent and context of Biden's comments.

So, my point is, if the wizard world is OK with it, then why 
are we still outraged?

Steve/bboyminn




From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Wed May  6 01:21:31 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 01:21:31 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtqk5v+7q0i@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtqomr+9hr9@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186448

Steve:
> So, my point is, if the wizard world is OK with it, then why 
> are we still outraged?

Magpie:
Because why would people make moral decisions based on what fictional people think? I agree every thing happens in context. I don't think every act done in HP is justified by the context. The fact that a circumstance is unusual or the person uses restraint when they hit the torture button doesn't necessarily make it admirable or not troubling. Maybe it's forgivable, but that doesn't really mean somebody's necessarily going to approve of what was done in the fictional story as a good thing. When you start saying things are "technically unforgivables but..." that doesn't sound like a way I want to think about them. And that's not because I would never be okay with a character using an unforgivable.  

-m




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Wed May  6 01:42:33 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 01:42:33 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtqk5v+7q0i@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtqpu9+ngg6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186449

Steve:
> 
> So, my point is, if the wizard world is OK with it, then why 
> are we still outraged?

Pippin:
Because Sirius was outraged in GoF. He was dealing with a context of war, in which many people approved of what Crouch was doing. And because Dumbledore eventually discovered that if he allowed this power to be used, he a) couldn't keep it out of the hands of people like Grindelwald, and b) couldn't control how he himself used it in a moment of rage or fear.

It's easy to cheer when Amycus and Alecto are punished and brought under control. JKR wants us to know just how easy it is. But that doesn't mean that we're supposed to think Harry and McGonagall acted wisely or for the best. Sirius clearly wouldn't have thought so.

Pippin






From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Wed May  6 02:01:50 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 02:01:50 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtqhio+7bdj@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtqr2e+fjq6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186450

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
>
> Montavilla47:
> 
> I didn't say that Harry was showing a grudge against James.
> I'm showing an example of Harry throwing James into Snape's
> face in PoA, even though it would be absurd for Harry to be
> holding a grudge against his dead father.
> 
> I'm doing that to support my contention that using A in an
> argument against B does not necessarily mean that you're
> holding a grudge against A. It can mean any number of
> things, including that it's an effective bit of ammunition.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Ah, sorry misunderstood you. However Harry does not talk about his father in a bad light, that is why I would not think that he indeed holds grudge against him, Snape however says bad things about him and that to me makes an obvious example of holding grudges.

Montavilla47:
But "saying bad things" about a person doesn't necessarily
equate to holding a grudge.  McGonagall says that James
and Sirius were troublemakers, but she didn't dislike them.

Of course, Snape doesn't like James at all.  I daresay he
still does hate him.  But that's not the same as holding a 
grudge, or worse, nursing it.  And it's certainly a far
cry from allowing it to blight and waste you life.

And that's really the part I take issue with.  Look, I 
can still get annoyed when I think about the way my
mother gave away that favorite toy of mine when 
I was six years old.  (And I do.... on occasion.)

If I were really mad at her, I might even bring it up.
But that doesn't mean I'm twisted up with hatred
and holding a grudge, I hope.  It simply means that
when we get angry we tend to bring up things that
happened in the past--whether or not they 
pertain. 


> Alla:
> >
> > You are right, Snape has a lot of reasons to be angry in this scene, however
> the reasons he **says** that he is angry about are :
> > a) Harry is using his spells against him;
> > b) His filfy father was using his spells against him.
> 
> Montavilla47:
> 
> Well, it's not like Snape can stop and explain to Harry
> that what he's really upset about at the moment is the
> fact that he was forced to kill the one person who didn't
> consider him scum.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Indeed, however it is not like if he does not say one of the reasons why he is upset, then another reason must be not true in my opinion. To me it is again, omission of the part of the truth.

Montavilla47:
Well, the best misdirection is going to be truthful, rather
than an out and out lie.  But it's a matter of degree.  I just
don't think it's that big a thing.  Snape's dealing with a lot
of stuff--and if he had to rank the things upsetting him
at that moment, James's use of Levicorpus twenty years
earlier would probably rank far behind:

1. Having to kill Dumbledore
2. Having to become a fugitive
3. Having to get that idiot Malfoy to a safe place
4. Having to keep the DEs from killing anyone
5. Having to keep the DEs from killing that idiot Potter
6. Wondering if Hagrid knows how to put out a fire
7. Trying to avoid the hippogriff poo littering the grass
8. Oh, yeah.  That idiot Potter is flinging spells at him.

> Montavilla47:
> <SNIP>
> I think it's a bit too hard to argue Snape as a noble character--
> in the sense of being forgiving or magnanimous. I don't see him
> as being forgiving at all--least of all to himself. But if you don't
> re-examine his character in light of the Prince's Tale, then you're
> holding onto a false interpretation of his character. The whole
> point of the Prince's Tale is to change our view of Snape.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> To me Prince's tale gave new information about Snape, it did not change his character completely at all.

Montavilla47:
There's a lot of room between "completely" and "at all."  Obviously,
Snape isn't going to change completely.  In fact, he's not to change 
at all.  It's our view that is intended to change.  Hopefully, it will
change in a direction that will make it seem plausible that Harry
names one of his sons after the man.  

Of course, I realize you think it's nuts that Harry does that, so 
I would say that it didn't have its intended purpose for you.  
And in my case, it couldn't raise my opinion of Snape, since that
was fairly high to begin with.  Instead, it lowered it a bit, because
I was disappointed about Snape being so indifferent about 
Voldemort killing a child.


> Montavilla47:
> <SNIP>
> There's no point where Snape says, "I do not hate James." And there's
> no point where he says that he does. But when Dumbledore scolds
> Snape for not trying to save James or Harry from Voldemort, Snape's
> reaction is indifference. Not anything about how he'd be happy
> if James died, or how James deserves it, or even how he much he
> feels in James's debt about that saving his life thing. James is
> *nothing* to him at that point.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> To me him asking Dumbledore to provide safety for Lily and not for her husband and baby even though Snape was the one who set Voldemort on them was proof enough that he hated them, IMO of course. I mean, he wants Dumbledore to save Lily but says nothing about James, I make a conclusion that he wants James to die, IMO of course.

Montavilla47:
Yeah, to me it shows him as indifferent.  I kind of think that's
a bit worse than hating James.  


> 
> Montavilla47:
> Moreover, Snape denies in PoA that James was doing anything
> but saving his own skin during the Prank. He obviously feels
> no debt at all to James about it. Which makes what Dumbledore
> told Harry a lie.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> I do not see how one follows from another. Snape says that, yes, but where does he say that I feel no debt to James?

Montavilla47:
Well, there's also that not asking Dumbledore to protect James 
thing.  If Snape felt that he owed a debt to James then he'd ask 
Dumbledore to save James, wouldn't he?  Logically?  I mean, 
wouldn't that release him from that crushing sense of obligation
that feeds the massive grudge he's nursing?


> 
> Montavilla47:
> Not to say that Snape wouldn't have had a romantic
> relationship with Lily if she would have been willing--but
> it seems really clear to me that Snape knows that *he* blew it with Lily. It wasn't that James won her--it was
> that Snape lost her.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> I do not have book with me right now, but Snape seemed awfully upset to me when Lily mentions James and Marauders and that she spents time with them. But I have to double check.
> He knows that he lost her friendship, for sure. But I got from Prince memory that Snape saw that Lily was moving to Marauders way before their break up happened, IMO of course.

Montavilla47:
He was certainly concerned when Lily told him he ought to be
grateful to James instead of harping on his "theory" about Lupin.
But when she says that James is a toerag, he relaxes.  But her
relationship with Lily is over long before Lily starts dating James.

So, there's no support for the idea that James "won" Lily away 
from Snape.  JKR makes it as clear as she can (as clear as those 
posters on Sirius's wall peg him as hetero) that James and Severus
were not direct rivals for Lily's love.  Or friendship.  Severus never 
got to experience Lily as a lover, while James never appeared to 
know her in a non-romantic friendly way.


> Montavilla47:
> So, I don't think Snape's ability to hold grudges
> is that unique. If it were the defining trait for his
> character then we'd be hard pressed to pull him
> out of a crowd.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Absolutely, a lot of people do, I agree. I just find Snape's ability to do that to be how to put, very distinctive and strong? And long?
>

Montavilla47:
I don't know.  Sirius managed a good grudge against
Peter that lasted at least twelves years and nearly 
caused him to murder the rat.  

He also kept up a grudge against Snape that--as 
far as we can tell--lasted until he died.  Which had as 
little basis as Snape's grudge against him.  

We don't really get to see if anyone keeps holding
a grudge against Snape after he dies.  We never, got
example, get to see if Neville asks Harry why he named 
his son after the Greasy Git of Hogwarts.  

Hmm.  I guess the record holder of grudges would
be Helena Ravenclaw who still seems miffed at her
mother even those she's a ghost.  

Nicholas is, of course, annoyed about being kept
out of the headless hunt, but he's only been dead for
five hundred years--and the ban against him is still 
ongoing.

Aberforth, according to someone, refused to speak
to Albus for a long time after Ariana's death--although
they eventually reconciled.  He also spoke badly
about Albus when he told the story to Harry.  Was
he holding a grudge?  If so, I think Aberforth would 
be the record-holding grudge-keeper among the 
living.  





From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Wed May  6 02:23:09 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 02:23:09 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12
In-Reply-To: <gtqies+l9cb@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtqsad+6fb9@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186451

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> > Montavilla47:
> > 
> > If JKR is trying to subvert the genre, then she needs to 
> > do a better job of letting us know that.  Otherwise, we'll
> > just assume she's following it.
> >
> 
> Pippin:
> She's told us that she's not following it, and doesn't particularly care for it. The work bears that out, IMO.
> 
> I don't think she's subverting the genre. She's re-inventing it to serve her purposes, one of which is to show us that the genre, the consensus fantasy universe, is just wrong about some things. 
> 
> Take the idea that once you step on to the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. There is no dark path in the Potterverse -- no Force or Ring of Power that compels the person who's made one bad choice to make another. You can rejoin the light any time -- provided you have the courage to realize that you made a mistake. And there doesn't necessarily have to be a bad consequence for you to realize that you made a mistake -- in the real world, people  learn from others' mistakes as well as their own. 

Montavilla47:

But.. the same is true in Star Wars and LotR.  People who make mistakes
in those stories can also choose to return to the Light, or the Hobbits or
the good side whenever they like.  I don't see how she's re-inventing fantasy
to allow free will to her characters.  

I mean, there's no point to even Evil in a story if people don't have a 
choice about committing it.

Moreover, there is a version of the Dark Force in the Potterverse.  It's 
Dark Magic.  But, whether by accident or design, there's no clear sense of
what Dark Magic actually is--except that if the DEs do it, it's bad, and 
if Harry or his compariots do it, it's a necessary or endearing slip.


Pippin:
> The danger, in JKR's world,  is not that doing evil things will erode your conscience until you are like Voldemort. The danger is that you won't realize how much damage you can do *without* being like Voldemort.
> 
> That a character criticizes someone and then does the exact same thing herself happens all the time in canon, no doubt illustrating the concept that it's easier to spot the speck in your neighbor's eye than a two-by-four in your own. 

Montavilla47:
Yes.  I'd say the series illustrates that in spades.

Pippin:
> What McGonagall does is just as foolish and hypocritical as what Harry did, and for the same reason: people are about to die for the right to be governed by laws instead of the whims of one person. What McGonagall's action does is show us *why* that right is worth dying for: because no individual, no matter how well-intentioned and well-behaved they are normally, can be trusted with that kind of power. 
> 
> McGonagall didn't do any great harm by her actions. Amycus and his sister no doubt lived to stand trial for their deeds. But then, no great harm was done by Dumbledore's flirtation with the Dark Arts, until there was. 

Montavilla47:
Right.  No great harm was done by McGonagall's actions, showing that
that power can be wielded by one person as long as they aren't 
homicial maniacs.

I'm all for wizards being governed by laws, rather than by whims of
any one person.  But the books show, over and over again, that 
following the laws is for suckers (like Percy).  Even those, like Arthur, 
who are  tasked with maintaining the law, regularly break or bend them 
to pursue their hobbies or get goodies like QWC tickets.  

And the hero, who breaks rules in every single book, is rewarded
for that behavior with the obvious message that the ends justify
the means.  Whenever Harry defeats Voldemort, his rule-breaking
is rewarded with House points and good luck.







From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Wed May  6 02:56:25 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 02:56:25 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtqr2e+fjq6@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtqu8p+7t6j@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186452

> Montavilla47:
> But "saying bad things" about a person doesn't necessarily
> equate to holding a grudge.  McGonagall says that James
> and Sirius were troublemakers, but she didn't dislike them.
> 
> Of course, Snape doesn't like James at all.  I daresay he
> still does hate him.  But that's not the same as holding a 
> grudge, or worse, nursing it.  And it's certainly a far
> cry from allowing it to blight and waste you life.
> 
> And that's really the part I take issue with.  <SNIP> 

Alla:

Responding only to some points, since we are way too different on others.
It is a matter of degree of course, and as long as we agree that Snape hates James still, I really do not care how it is called. We will probably agree to disagree on the degree Snape hates James though lol.

And the same part with wasting his life, it is again a matter of degree - I am certainly not saying that Snape wasted his life to the point that he did not do anything else, however again we are agreeing to disagree, because I certainly think that his grudge handicapped him to a degree, metaphorically or course.
> Montavilla47:
> Well, the best misdirection is going to be truthful, rather
> than an out and out lie.  But it's a matter of degree.  I just
> don't think it's that big a thing.  Snape's dealing with a lot
> of stuff--and if he had to rank the things upsetting him
> at that moment, James's use of Levicorpus twenty years
> earlier would probably rank far behind:
> 
> 1. Having to kill Dumbledore
> 2. Having to become a fugitive
> 3. Having to get that idiot Malfoy to a safe place
> 4. Having to keep the DEs from killing anyone
> 5. Having to keep the DEs from killing that idiot Potter
> 6. Wondering if Hagrid knows how to put out a fire
> 7. Trying to avoid the hippogriff poo littering the grass
> 8. Oh, yeah.  That idiot Potter is flinging spells at him.

Alla:

See I cannot agree with this at all. It is just not what he is saying to me in that quote. I do not see how you get this gradation, I mean I will grant that killing Dumbledore is high on his list, but the fact that you (generic you) would put these as your priorities, does not mean to me that Snape will be upset in this order. So I will put the idiot Potter firing spells at him and that bringing a flashback of his filfy father somewhere on 2 or 3. I could be wrong of course but Snape gave me no reason to think otherwise.



> 
> > Alla:
> > 
> > To me Prince's tale gave new information about Snape, it did not change his character completely at all.
> 
> Montavilla47:
> There's a lot of room between "completely" and "at all." 

Alla:

Yeah, that was an awkward construction, sorry about that. I will change it to - it did not change his character **much** to me.

Montavilla47:
>Obviously,
> Snape isn't going to change completely.  In fact, he's not to change 
> at all.  It's our view that is intended to change.  Hopefully, it will
> change in a direction that will make it seem plausible that Harry
> names one of his sons after the man.  
> 
> Of course, I realize you think it's nuts that Harry does that, so 
> I would say that it didn't have its intended purpose for you.  

Alla:

Small correction, I do not think that it is nuts that Harry does it - **the way Harry is portrayed**, as someone who is saving WW and thus symbolically can grant forgiveness to last scum of the earth. No I do not consider Snape to be last scum of the earth, just a loser and an abuser, but you get what I mean.

Had Ron for example been in Harry's place and named his kid after Snape or Neville, yeah, I want to think that I would have been able to get over such plot development, but I really am not sure.

And of course I know I would not have ever done that. Had I been in Harry's place, I would absolutely restored Snape's name, would have made sure that he is known as a hero. But I would not have done it in the name of true forgiveness, I would have done it for myself, because I would have wanted to move on and never ever think about him again. But again, this is not true forgiveness and to me Harry naming his child after Snape is a very symbol of that. As I always thought though Harry's forgiveness ability is much higher than mine.

Montavilla47:
> And in my case, it couldn't raise my opinion of Snape, since that
> was fairly high to begin with.  Instead, it lowered it a bit, because
> I was disappointed about Snape being so indifferent about 
> Voldemort killing a child.

Alla:

Sometimes it pays to think the worst of the character, you see? One can go nowhere but up lol. I was not dissapointed at all, this was one of the few points which I was pretty sure about and was amused when people argued that Snape came to Dumbledore because he was so upset when Voldemort decided to hunt a baby.


> Montavilla47:
<SNIP>
> Aberforth, according to someone, refused to speak
> to Albus for a long time after Ariana's death--although
> they eventually reconciled.  He also spoke badly
> about Albus when he told the story to Harry.  Was
> he holding a grudge?  If so, I think Aberforth would 
> be the record-holding grudge-keeper among the 
> living.

Alla:

But I mean, there was a death involved and if it was a grudge feels to me as more justifiable one. But yeah, you are right.





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Wed May  6 04:33:46 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 04:33:46 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12
In-Reply-To: <gtqsad+6fb9@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtr3va+ttkc@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186453

 
> Montavilla47:
> 
> But.. the same is true in Star Wars and LotR.  People who make mistakes in those stories can also choose to return to the Light, or the Hobbits or the good side whenever they like.

Pippin:
I'm not talking about free will, I'm talking about conscience. Of course Sauron himself could still do good things if he wanted to. But  he no longer feels any remorse about what he's doing, even though we're told he wasn't evil in the beginning.  

There's a downward spiral in those stories that doesn't exist in the Potterverse, a sense that at some point the conscience erodes completely. "Neither strength nor good purpose will last" says Gandalf. The Ring and the Dark Side  can turn normal people into psychopaths or the magical equivalent. But there's nothing in the Potterverse that will do that. If you were born with a conscience, you're stuck with it. Even Quirrell, though he spouts Voldemort's teaching that there is no good and evil,  can't bring himself to think that killing unicorns is okay. 

Dark Magic is defined in Snape's lesson -- it deprives people of their lives, or their will, or it causes unbearable pain.  It's Dark Wizard that's a nebulous, and eventually, IMO, an erroneous concept. There are people who are so damaged that they have no conscience but there isn't anything different about the way they do magic. 
  
> 
> Montavilla47:
> Right.  No great harm was done by McGonagall's actions, showing that
> that power can be wielded by one person as long as they aren't 
> homicial maniacs.

Pippin:
That's what you could believe, until you hear Dumbledore's story. In the first place, he didn't have to be a homicidal maniac to use deadly force against an innocent, and in the second place, he fooled himself into thinking that Grindelwald wasn't a homicidal maniac at all. And he's the guy who's supposed to have such great insight into people. If he can't tell who is or isn't a homicidal maniac, who can? Certainly not Harry! How many times did he get fooled?

The books don't show that following laws is for suckers, IMO. They show that the laws have to bend to serve the people and not the other way around. The rules are made for the students, not the students for the rules.

There's no sense that Arthur is doing a bad thing by trying to keep dangerous magic out of Muggle hands or keeping people from being cheated by wizard con artists. It doesn't seem like he's doing anything very wrong by trading favors, until we find out that Umbridge is doing the same kind of thing for Willie Widdershins. Then we see where it can lead. 


Pippin




From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Wed May  6 07:30:25 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 07:30:25 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtqomr+9hr9@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtreah+p3ta@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186454

--- "sistermagpie" <sistermagpie at ...> wrote:
>
> Steve:
> > So, my point is, if the wizard world is OK with it, then why 
> > are we still outraged?
> 
> Magpie:
> Because why would people make moral decisions based on what
> fictional people think? 

bboyminn:

Not sure what this means, a great deal of morality is taught
by fictional characters in myth, fable, legend, other books,
and just plain fiction. I find great moral understanding in
the Harry Potter books as well as the Ender's Game books.

Magpie continues:

>I agree every thing happens in context. I don't think every
> act done in HP is justified by the context. The fact that a
> circumstance is unusual or the person uses restraint when 
> they hit the torture button doesn't necessarily make it 
> admirable or not troubling. Maybe it's forgivable, but that
> doesn't really mean somebody's necessarily going to approve 
> of what was done in the fictional story as a good thing. 

bboyminn:

Oddly, on this we agree, I didn't mean to imply that it was
OK for Harry to do what he did. It was wrong, especially when
he had other choice available to him, but it was also 
understandable, and it occurred under mitigating circumstances.
And I think the Wizard World understands those mitigating
circumstances and forgives the act. But while they forgive it,
they also disapprove of it and condemn it as wrong. They
socially and perhaps morally condemn it as wrong, but in a
practical sense, and in a legal sense, they understand it
and the circumstances, and are willing to let it go.

If, Harry or McGonagall had sustained their action, or been
brutal or cruel, then it would have been a different story.
They both showed restraint relative to what those curses 
could have done. In neither case was any real harm done. In
neither case, was the 'victim' make to suffer beyond what was
clearly necessary. Again, I ask as I've asked before, if it
only last 3 seconds and does no harm, can we really call it
torture? 

I don't think this approaches war crimes or crime against
humanity the way most horrendous acts of war are viewed. 

In war, horrible things are done by everyone. These things are
forgiven in the context of war and in the context of a real
threat to your own life or the lives of others. 

Magpie concludes"

> When you start saying things are "technically unforgivables
> but..." that doesn't sound like a way I want to think about
> them. And that's not because I would never be okay with a 
> character using an unforgivable.  
> 
> -m

bboyminn:

But that is the way life is, there are far more exceptions
than there are rules. War, in and of itself, is an immoral act
by all who participate. But we participate none the less because,
right or wrong, it is sometimes necessary. 

The full statement I made was -

"Yes, these were technically Unforgivables, but they were done
in unusual circumstances and done with great restraint."

Which was the lead in to a discussion of real world law. It
is wrong to kill, but there are many exceptions to the general
moral and legal statement. 

And the whole point of this point was that we don't know how
the wizard's law is written, we don't know if it includes
exception. All we have is Moody's general statement of the
legal nature of the Unforgivables, but that was not a quote 
of the law, it was a general statement of the worst possible 
consequences. 

Now, because we don't know the wizard's law, I can say whether
there are or are not exceptions written into the law. Perhaps 
the unforgivable killing curse is only unforgivable when used 
offensively, yet in the right circumstances allowed when used
defensively? We don't know. But if real world law can serve 
as an example, then likely there are exceptions.

Also, it doesn't seem as if wizard's law is that hard and 
tight. If fact it seems very loose, and able to change to fit
the needs of the moment. I'm not even saying that is right,
but it seems somewhat true. Again, it is very much a seat of
your pants frontier mentality. 

So, I do think Harry was wrong, but that doesn't mean, 
considering the circumstances and context, I can't understand
it and, perhaps not totally forgive, but at least overlook it. 

I think that is very much the way the wizard world approaches
the circumstance. 

So, apparently on this we disagree, I think 'unusual 
circumstances' and 'great restraint' do matter and do qualify
as mitigating circumstances, and you do not. Fair enough.

Steve/bboyminn




From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Wed May  6 07:47:25 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 07:47:25 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtqpu9+ngg6@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtrfad+rgko@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186455

---  "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
>
> Steve:
> > 
> > So, my point is, if the wizard world is OK with it, then why 
> > are we still outraged?
> 
> Pippin:
> Because Sirius was outraged in GoF. He was dealing with a 
> context of war, in which many people approved of what Crouch
> was doing. 

bboyminn:

And I think Sirius, if he were around, would still be outraged,
but I also think he would understand and forgive, though not
without a stern lecture first.

I think in hindsight, even Harry has his regrets, though, of
course, I can't know with certainty. 


Pippin continues:

> And because Dumbledore eventually discovered that if he 
> allowed this power to be used, he a) couldn't keep it out 
> of the hands of people like Grindelwald, and b) couldn't 
> control how he himself used it in a moment of rage or fear.
> 

bboyminn:

Now you seem to be talking about something completely different.
You seem to be talking of the Elder Wand and not the 
Unforgivables.

Dumbledore DID trust himself to own the Elder Wand and to use
it with restraint. But he didn't trust himself with the other
Hallows, though that was a lesson he had to learn the hard
way, and it ultimately cost him his life. 

But, in the context of Unforgivable curses, there was nothing
to stop Dumbledore or anyone else from using them but their own
self restraint or lack thereof. 


Pippin Concludes:

> It's easy to cheer when Amycus and Alecto are punished and
> brought under control. JKR wants us to know just how easy it
> is. But that doesn't mean that we're supposed to think Harry
> and McGonagall acted wisely or for the best. Sirius clearly 
> wouldn't have thought so.
> 
> Pippin
>

bboyminn:

In this last part, I think you make a very good point. JKR 
wanted us to have this moral debate. She wanted us to see how
easily even the best of us can slip over the line. 

I further agree that what Harry did was wrong, I just don't see
it with the same intense moral outrage that some see. I am 
disappointed that Harry would make that choice. But at the same
time, I understand how it could happen, and the fact that he
was very restrained in his use of the curse, does in my mind
create mitigating circumstances. 

For some the response is true outrage, but for me it is 
understanding coupled with disappointment. Yet, I can forgive
it, while not believing it was the wisest choice Harry could
have made. 

I do very much think JKR put this in the story as a point of 
moral ambiguity. I think she wanted us to at least internally
have the very debate we are having, and did so knowing that
there could never be a right answer to the dilemma. 

Harry is not perfect, but on the whole, he is a moral, noble,
and right-thinking right-doing person. His virtues far outweigh
his flaws.

But then...that's just my opinion.

Steve/bboyminn






From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Wed May  6 07:54:33 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 07:54:33 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtqu8p+7t6j@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtrfnp+leiv@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186456

> > Montavilla47:
> > Well, the best misdirection is going to be truthful, rather
> > than an out and out lie.  But it's a matter of degree.  I just
> > don't think it's that big a thing.  Snape's dealing with a lot
> > of stuff--and if he had to rank the things upsetting him
> > at that moment, James's use of Levicorpus twenty years
> > earlier would probably rank far behind:
> > 
> > 1. Having to kill Dumbledore
> > 2. Having to become a fugitive
> > 3. Having to get that idiot Malfoy to a safe place
> > 4. Having to keep the DEs from killing anyone
> > 5. Having to keep the DEs from killing that idiot Potter
> > 6. Wondering if Hagrid knows how to put out a fire
> > 7. Trying to avoid the hippogriff poo littering the grass
> > 8. Oh, yeah.  That idiot Potter is flinging spells at him.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> See I cannot agree with this at all. It is just not what he is saying to me in that quote. I do not see how you get this gradation, I mean I will grant that killing Dumbledore is high on his list, but the fact that you (generic you) would put these as your priorities, does not mean to me that Snape will be upset in this order. So I will put the idiot Potter firing spells at him and that bringing a flashback of his filfy father somewhere on 2 or 3. I could be wrong of course but Snape gave me no reason to think otherwise.
> 

Montavilla47:
I put them down in the order they came into my head.  It's
not intended to reflect their order of importance to Snape
at the moment. 

:)


> > Montavilla47:
> <SNIP>
> > Aberforth, according to someone, refused to speak
> > to Albus for a long time after Ariana's death--although
> > they eventually reconciled.  He also spoke badly
> > about Albus when he told the story to Harry.  Was
> > he holding a grudge?  If so, I think Aberforth would 
> > be the record-holding grudge-keeper among the 
> > living.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> But I mean, there was a death involved and if it was a grudge feels to me as more justifiable one. But yeah, you are right.


Montavilla47:

Well, there was a death involved with Snape, too--at least
until Snape understood that Sirius hadn't betrayed Lily.  And,
if Snape was holding a grudge against James, I would guess
that James being stupid enough to refuse Dumbledore's offer
of secret keeping was a large part of it.  (Isn't that what he
tells Harry in PoA?  Accusing him of being too proud to 
accept help or something like that?  I seem to remember
there being something he mentions about James that relates
to the secret-keeper debacle.)

And, of course, there was another death.  Snape's.







From foxmoth at qnet.com  Wed May  6 14:18:59 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 14:18:59 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtrfad+rgko@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gts68j+k3ag@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186457

 
> Pippin continues:
> 
> > And because Dumbledore eventually discovered that if he 
> > allowed this power to be used, he a) couldn't keep it out 
> > of the hands of people like Grindelwald, and b) couldn't 
> > control how he himself used it in a moment of rage or fear.
> > 
> 
> bboyminn:
> 
> Now you seem to be talking about something completely different.
> You seem to be talking of the Elder Wand and not the 
> Unforgivables.
> 

Pippin:
Sorry that was unclear.  I'm talking about Dumbledore's plans to "seize control" using "only the force that is necessary  and no more" as quoted in his letter to Grindelwald DH ch 18. When Aberforth rebelled, Albus discovered how his attempt to seize control would work out -- not only had Grindelwald always intended to use more force than Albus thought necessary, Albus found that under pressure so did he. 

No one would argue that Harry and McGonagall didn't need to seize control of the school, and one can certainly understand  and forgive them for not stopping to calibrate how much force would be necessary. But IMO, that's JKR's point. We've created this mythology of superheroes who never use more force than is necessary, we feed it to our children, and then they have to unlearn it, as Harry does,  before they're prepared to deal with power in the real world.

Pippin





From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Wed May  6 14:21:31 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 14:21:31 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtreah+p3ta@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gts6db+3pji@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186458

> > Steve:
> > > So, my point is, if the wizard world is OK with it, then why 
> > > are we still outraged?
> > 
> > Magpie:
> > Because why would people make moral decisions based on what
> > fictional people think? 
> 
> bboyminn:
> 
> Not sure what this means, a great deal of morality is taught
> by fictional characters in myth, fable, legend, other books,
> and just plain fiction. I find great moral understanding in
> the Harry Potter books as well as the Ender's Game books.

Magpie:
I meant that if as a reader you find something wrong, the fact that the people within the fictional universe think it's great wouldn't necessarily change your mind. Would I change my views on slavery reading historical fiction set in the American South where none of the characters object to it? 

I think this is especially true in books where morality is claimed to be an issue in the book. "Think for youself about right and wrong" doesn't seem like it would be something strange to the HP-verse, and JKR's pretty good at setting up situations where different characters disagree on something somebody did. 

So the fact that the characters are pleased with themselves and don't get punished for something they do doesn't necessarily effect whether I think it was wrong. Sometimes it just makes me think the characters are a bit thick or getting unrealistic results because the author's writing the reactions to fit how she feels about the situation. Sometimes I think the author's just pushing her views of right and wrong into the story and I disagree with her. Or maybe we wouldn't disagree much about moral issues in real life but I don't enjoy the scenes the same way. That's obvious throughout the books, like where fair numbers of readers will find something a character did repulsive and in interviews JKR will reveal she was enjoying the character's actions vicariously.

 
> Magpie continues:
> 
> >I agree every thing happens in context. I don't think every
> > act done in HP is justified by the context. The fact that a
> > circumstance is unusual or the person uses restraint when 
> > they hit the torture button doesn't necessarily make it 
> > admirable or not troubling. Maybe it's forgivable, but that
> > doesn't really mean somebody's necessarily going to approve 
> > of what was done in the fictional story as a good thing. 
> 
> bboyminn:
> 
> Oddly, on this we agree, I didn't mean to imply that it was
> OK for Harry to do what he did. It was wrong, especially when
> he had other choice available to him, but it was also 
> understandable, and it occurred under mitigating circumstances.
> And I think the Wizard World understands those mitigating
> circumstances and forgives the act. But while they forgive it,
> they also disapprove of it and condemn it as wrong. They
> socially and perhaps morally condemn it as wrong, but in a
> practical sense, and in a legal sense, they understand it
> and the circumstances, and are willing to let it go.

> If, Harry or McGonagall had sustained their action, or been
> brutal or cruel, then it would have been a different story.
> They both showed restraint relative to what those curses 
> could have done. In neither case was any real harm done. In
> neither case, was the 'victim' make to suffer beyond what was
> clearly necessary. Again, I ask as I've asked before, if it
> only last 3 seconds and does no harm, can we really call it
> torture? 

Magpie:
True--though I don't think in the Crucio scene that anybody in the scene thinks it's wrong at all. Harry stands by his action and McGonagall's protests have nothing to do with its being wrong. She describes the action as gallant but foolish (iow, foolish because Harry might have gotten caught).

Personally, I take the scene as just an action movie moment not unlike the "Not my daughter, you bitch!" moment. I think it's a moment we're supposed to cheer. (And if it's kept in the movie I suspect the screenwriters will set it up to make sure we do.) But I can understand why a lot of people are pulled up by it regardless of no harm done or relative restraint. I do think you can call zapping somebody with a torture curse for 3 seconds torture, just as electrocuting somebody's testicles for 3 seconds would be called torture. Just as everytime Harry's zapped with one for no matter how short a time it seems to be shown as torture. All torture is done under the claim that the victim is not suffering beyond what's "clearly necessary". In the case of Harry's Crucio it's not necessary at all. The guy just deserves some serious pain in Harry's opinion. A stunning spell would have taken care of necessary.

Steve:
> I don't think this approaches war crimes or crime against
> humanity the way most horrendous acts of war are viewed. 

Magpie:
Sure, but I don't think anybody has accused Harry of that. It seems like people just see this moment as a disappointing one for Harry that's a bigger deal for them than it's presented to be in canon. 

> Magpie concludes"
> 
> > When you start saying things are "technically unforgivables
> > but..." that doesn't sound like a way I want to think about
> > them. And that's not because I would never be okay with a 
> > character using an unforgivable.  

> bboyminn:
> 
> But that is the way life is, there are far more exceptions
> than there are rules. War, in and of itself, is an immoral act
> by all who participate. But we participate none the less because,
> right or wrong, it is sometimes necessary. 
> 
> The full statement I made was -
> 
> "Yes, these were technically Unforgivables, but they were done
> in unusual circumstances and done with great restraint."
> 
> Which was the lead in to a discussion of real world law. It
> is wrong to kill, but there are many exceptions to the general
> moral and legal statement. 

Magpie:
I agree, but the fact that there are exceptions and that's the way life works isn't a blanket OK for any time somebody does anything. 

Maybe a better question for me to understand is what seems so wrong or misguided about people talking about what they find wrong in these scenes? It's not like Harry's life is affected by readers voicing objections. He and his friends aren't punished or even reprimanded for the things they do within their own world. Why would it be better if readers just took a cue from wizards (or other readers) on the issue? Wizard law doesn't really matter to us, since it's fictional. I think people, when they voice opinions about stuff like this, are talking more about what they see as bigger than law. They just sometimes disagree on it--sometimes people think the characters were genuinely right in what they did, sometimes they think they were genuinely wrong. I don't think anybody cares whether or not Harry broke the law of his fictional world, they object the action itself and how it's presented. I'm sure the WW wouldn't think twice about letting Harry off if they knew he'd cast Unforgivables. Which means nothing one way or the other because Wizard law is notoriously biased and arbitrary.

I can understand this sort of thing being pointless if it's not the point of the book. Like, slavery just exists in GWTW and if you're only objecting to that you're not dealing with the story that much. But HP is all about the things the good guys do to fight evil, so this type things seems central to the story to me. 
Steve:

> So, apparently on this we disagree, I think 'unusual 
> circumstances' and 'great restraint' do matter and do qualify
> as mitigating circumstances, and you do not. Fair enough.

Magpie:
The scene didn't particularly bother me. Like I said I just thought it was an action movie moment. But I think, also, that people have meta-objections to the idea of the author setting up this curse the way she did and then wanting her hero to be able to throw it to show how cool he was. I think that's probably where a lot of readers come from when they don't like the scene. They know Harry's supposed to be cool in that scene and that didn't work for them. 

-m




From no.limberger at gmail.com  Wed May  6 14:30:11 2009
From: no.limberger at gmail.com (No Limberger)
Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 07:30:11 -0700
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: MAGICkal elITE - The Boy, The Man, The Hero, 
	the Saint.
In-Reply-To: <gtq45d+i34q@eGroups.com>
References: <gtptdm+6ldr@eGroups.com> <gtq45d+i34q@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <7ef72f90905060730uc2f4cf8w905f0a241db7b3d3@mail.gmail.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186459

>Carol wrote:
>I certainly agree that Harry is not Christ, but I
>have yet to encounter anyone who claims that he is.
>And I agree that viewing Harry as a Christ figure or
>not is a personal preference (as is viewing Harry from
>the perspective of "the hero's journey").

No.Limberger responds:
On this we can agree.  At no time have I claimed that
anyone here has claimed that Harry is Christ.

>Carol wrote:
>SNIP<
>a Christ *figure* is a common literary motif which
>is different from an allegorical representation of Christ

No.Limberger responds:
In earlier thread (a few weeks back), I believe you referenced
the following site as a source for the definition of a
"Christ figure": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_figure.

Here is that definition taken directly from Wikipedia:
"A *Christ figure* is a literary technique that authors use to
draw allusions between their characters and the biblical Jesus
Christ."

No where does this definition indicate what can or cannot
be used as a basis for comparison, nor is there an
indication that any particular individual or group has been
authorized to make such determinations.  In fact, if one
follows the definition of "allusion" in Wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion), one finds the following
statement: "M.H. Abrams defined allusion as 'a brief reference,
explicit or indirect, to a person, place or event, or to
another literary work or
passage.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion#cite_note-0>'
It is left to the reader or
hearer to make the connection (Fowler)."
In other words, it is in the eye of the beholder, which is
what I have repeated stated in past postings on this
subject, but have been told by several that that view is
wrong.

IMO, those that prefer use of the term "Christ figure" are
alluding only to a single similarity: that of Harry dying and
coming back to life.  They often also make references to a
scant number of biblical quotations, as well as comments
made by JK Rowling.  The purpose, then, is not to
use the term "Christ figure" as merely a literary
comparison (a comparison that I personally find no
relevant value given the weakness of the definition
itself), but to imply a more deliberate attempt by JKR
to use the Harry Potter books a means to promote
Christianity itself.  This is something that I completely
disagree with.

Then, when a closer comparison between Harry and
Jesus yields the tremendous differences between the
two characters; differences, that imo, are being ignored
by those who prefer the term "Christ figure", there is
an immediate implication that to do so is wrong.  Why?
As demonstrated, the definition of "Christ figure" does
not specify what constitutes what can be compared.

>Carol wrote (SNIP):
>You're trying to make the definition of Christ figure
>identical with Christ himself.

No.Limberger responds:
No, I am demonstrating obvious weaknesses in the
definition itself.  I am also showing how different Harry
is from Jesus; differences, that imo, show how imperfect
and flawed Harry is as compared with the perceived
perfection and unblemished Jesus as described in
the new testament.

>Carol wrote (SNIP):
>A Christ figure, as any literary critic would tell you,
>resembles Christ in certain significant ways.

No.Limberger responds:
What ways?  Certainly not the ones that are
different.

>Carol wrote:
>No virgin birth is necessary for a literary character to
>be interpreted as a Christ figure. No walking on water is
>necessary. No magi are necessary (though it's rather
>likely that the newborn Harry was visited by three wizards
>named Lupin, Black, and Pettigrew). no crown of thorns
>is necessary. Ad infinitum.

No.Limberger responds:
Because to do so removes the Christ figure allusion if
a number of those qualities are not present.

>Carol wrote:
>And I have yet to hear any Christian complain that a
>Christ figure "waters down" the concept of Christ.

No.Limberger responds:
Certainly those who have used the term as a way
to promote Christianity itself would not say that.

>Carol wrote:
>Can you refresh our memories regarding the
>"hero's journey" and how it applies to Harry?

No.Limberger responds:
Here's one link out of many that illustrate the
"the hero's journey":
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html

Here's the difference between "the hero's journey"
and "Christ figure": "the hero's journey" is a
purely secular term that neither promotes nor
denies any particular religious view; whereas
"Christ figure" is a religious-based term sometimes
used to promote Christianity itself.

>bboyminn wrote:
>Next to terminology, to say 'Christ Figure' in the context of
>Harry, is too strong a statement for my taste, though I concede
>it is mostly a shorthand or generalized comment when used in
>literary discussion. But to me it implies at least an allegorical
>similarity. I think that is far too strong for Harry.

>Next is the term 'Christ-like', again frequently used as a
>generalization, but still to me it implies too strong of a
>parallel.

>So, the best I can say, is that there are subtle and symbolic
>parallels in Harry's story, as there are in most Hero's stories.

No.Limberger responds:
Yes, I agree.

>bboyminn wrote:
>In many discussions, people have complained at how imperfect
>Harry was, he shouldn't have done this, he shouldn't have done
>that, but I think that imperfection is the very thing we see
>reflected in ourselves. Harry doesn't always know what to do
>or what is right, so like us everyday people, he blunders and,
>like us ordinary people, more often than not, he gets it right.

>So, we know and love Harry (and friends) both because they
>are 'everyman' and are also 'heroic'. In a sense, the stories
>leave us feeling that if Harry can do it, if Ron can do it,
>if Nevile can do, then so can we. I've read countless stories
>of young kids who were inspired to do the right thing, to
>make better choices because of Harry and friends.

No.Limberger responds:
IMO, it is far easier to relate to a very human characters like
Harry and friends than to religious figure such as Jesus who
was supposed a deity in human form.

>bboyminn wrote:
>Still, I stay my discomfort because I know a larger portion
>of that comparative language is very generalized and not
>meant to be taken literally.

No.Limberger responds:
Unlike "the hero's journey" that is clearly defined, the
definition of "Christ figure" is too vague and can be
interpreted by different people in too many ways.

-- 
"Why won't you dance with me, I'm not no limburger!", The B-52's


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Wed May  6 16:26:51 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 16:26:51 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gts6db+3pji@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtsdob+kql2@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186460

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "sistermagpie" <sistermagpie at ...> wrote:
. That's obvious throughout the books, like where fair numbers of readers will find something a character did repulsive and in interviews JKR will reveal she was enjoying the character's actions vicariously.
> 

Pippin:
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Draco  enjoys performing the cruciatus curse on Rowle enough to be able to do it, and yet he  is also repulsed by what he's doing, so much that Voldemort has to threaten him to make him continue. 

 I can perfectly well understand that Rowling can make a character do something that she knows is repulsive, and at the same time, enjoy her power to inflict a vicarious punishment. 

I have to admit that the first time I read the destruction of the Dursley living room in GoF, I thought it was hilarious slapstick. Now it just seems sad. And I'm sure these are exactly the reactions JKR had in mind. But JKR doesn't like to ruin the story for those who haven't read it yet by telling people ahead of time how they are going to feel when the whole story is over.


> Magpie:
> True--though I don't think in the Crucio scene that anybody in the scene thinks it's wrong at all. Harry stands by his action and McGonagall's protests have nothing to do with its being wrong. She describes the action as gallant but foolish (iow, foolish because Harry might have gotten caught).

Pippin:
It wouldn't be foolish to get caught in order to save innocent lives -- that's what they are all about to do. But it's foolish to get caught for a moment of petty revenge on a criminal. And in a larger sense, it's foolish to fight fire with fire, though that's clearly not what McGonagall is thinking at the time. Her words are made trues than she knows, as often happens in canon.

Magpie:
> Personally, I take the scene as just an action movie moment not unlike the "Not my daughter, you bitch!" moment. I think it's a moment we're supposed to cheer. 

Pippin:
But you're not cheering. And children do not cheer this moment, AFAIK.  They're shocked, and they don't need any one to tell them they should be shocked. And I suspect they're shocked when Molly swears, also. 

The people who do cheer are almost always careful to say they wouldn't cheer if it was real life. They enjoy the thrill of being able to indulge the human bias towards overkill without worrying about the consequences. But the way that JKR's world is set up, we can tell that consequences would happen, just as we know that Snape's body is going to rot where it lies unless somebody arranges a burial.

Nobody is sorry when Bella dies. But if Molly went around zapping everyone, would that be a good thing? We already know she's not always just in her anger.

Pippin






From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Wed May  6 17:12:52 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 17:12:52 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtsdob+kql2@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtsgek+u2hu@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186461

Magpie:
> . That's obvious throughout the books, like where fair numbers of readers will find something a character did repulsive and in interviews JKR will reveal she was enjoying the character's actions vicariously.
> > 
> 
> Pippin:
> The two aren't mutually exclusive. Draco  enjoys performing the cruciatus curse on Rowle enough to be able to do it, and yet he  is also repulsed by what he's doing, so much that Voldemort has to threaten him to make him continue. 
> 
>  I can perfectly well understand that Rowling can make a character do something that she knows is repulsive, and at the same time, enjoy her power to inflict a vicarious punishment. 

Magpie:
I meant that she doesn't seem to have put it in to repulse people on the fictional level. I mean, there are plenty of things JKR has her characters do, things that she laughs at or expresses satisfaction about in interviews, that I would never think she'd do in real life. I'm not worried about her doing any of this stuff or encouraging people to actually do them. I just meant that there are times where readers' reactions to things are obviously different from her own as she describes them when talking about the incident. When readers pick up on something she was trying to put across she's often not shy of saying so. I don't think she's really predicted all the possible reactions to the things she writes. On the contrary, I think one of the things that holds the books together is a rather consistent pov about the world. I think some reader's reactions to her fictional scenes are a genuine surprise to her.

So what I mean is just that I think she sets up plenty of situations that are guaranteed to get different reactions from people--it's why there are so many different opinions on the characters as well--even though I don't think she always writes them in order to create disagreement. She's not writing a philosophical meditation, after all, she's writing a plot where things often happen to get them to the next point. I'm sure there are places where she thinks she wrote in a realistic reaction or fallout to something that leaves some readers scratching their heads. 

Luckily she has a strong narrative voice that figuratively takes you by the arm and sort of frogmarches you through the book--at least that's how it feels to me. So sometimes it's only when the whole thing's over that you start questioning somebody's reaction or the way things panned out. I think that would be related to what Hitchcock called "icebox logic."

> Magpie:
> > Personally, I take the scene as just an action movie moment not unlike the "Not my daughter, you bitch!" moment. I think it's a moment we're supposed to cheer. 
> 
> Pippin:
> But you're not cheering. And children do not cheer this moment, AFAIK.  They're shocked, and they don't need any one to tell them they should be shocked. And I suspect they're shocked when Molly swears, also.

Magpie:
Some children are, I know. And yet McGonagall, the character that JKR has in the scene with him, calls his action gallant. And in an interview JKR reacts to children's shock with "Well, he's never been a saint." I just don't see this scene written at all as intending to shock anybody with Harry's sadism and cruelty. The book's YA at this point even. 

Pippin: 
> The people who do cheer are almost always careful to say they wouldn't cheer if it was real life. They enjoy the thrill of being able to indulge the human bias towards overkill without worrying about the consequences. But the way that JKR's world is set up, we can tell that consequences would happen, just as we know that Snape's body is going to rot where it lies unless somebody arranges a burial.

Magpie:
Not always, actually. There have been discussions on this list about how it was fine or even good what Harry did. As I think there would be in real life.

I do agree with you, though, that since it's fiction it really is more about indulging in overkill in a safe setting. Nobody's really getting tortured here. This isn't about a reader's reaction to actual torture, it's the reaction to this scene in a story. I just think the scene is more written as a safe indulgence rather than with an intent to trouble us about that indulgence later. If there's anything darker I tend to feel it's more what Steve described, that we're seeing here that Harry's an adult now, and war is hell, and he can perform these curses now--but only does it in extreme situations like this. We can trust Harry won't go overboard because he uses his power to punish bullies.

Pippin: 
> Nobody is sorry when Bella dies. But if Molly went around zapping everyone, would that be a good thing? We already know she's not always just in her anger.

Magpie:
I was only drawing a comparison with the Molly moment being an action movie cheer moment. I don't think her actions in that scene are troubling. That really is an example of her jumping into a fight to protect her child who's endangered by a killer.

-m




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May  6 18:32:17 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 18:32:17 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtreah+p3ta@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtsl3h+7i2g@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186462

bboyminn wrote (re Harry Crucioing amycys):
> <snip>
> Again, I ask as I've asked before, if it only last 3 seconds and does no harm, can we really call it torture? 

Carol responds:
Yes, I think we can. First, Harry knows from Bellatrix, the Crucio expert, that righteous anger won't sustain a Crucio. The Crucio he attempts against her fails. All it does is knock her off her feet, but she doesn't writhe with pain (OoP Am. ed. 810). But with Amycus, Harry realizes that Bellatrix is right: "you have to mean it" (DH Am. ed. ). You have to want to cause pain to cast a Crucio successfully. 

And Harry's Crucio of Amycus *does* cause him to "writh[e] like a drowning man, thrashing and howling in pain" before he crashes against a bookcase and falls unconscious to the floor (593).

Harry, whose blood is "thundering through his brain," knows that this Crucio succeeded because he meant it, because he wanted Amycus to suffer. And Harry, having been Crucio'd himself more than once, knows exactly what a Crucio feels like.

Near the end of HBP, one of the Death Eaters (perhaps Amycus himself) Crucios Harry for a few seconds before Snape stops him. (Harry, of course, thinks it's Snape who's torturing him.) "[E]xcruciating pain hit Harry; he keeled over in the grass. Someone [Harry himself?] was screaming, he would surely die of this agony, Snape was going to torture him to death or madness--" (HBP Am. ed. 603).

Snape roars "No! and the pain stops as suddenly as it started, but Harry is still lying curled up on the grass and panting, only dimly aware of Snape stand above him yelling at the Death Eaters to leave "Potter" alone and go. A moment later, he's on his feet, aiming all his misdirected rage at Snape.

It's true that the Cruciatus Curse, unlike Muggle torture, causes no lasting damage unless it's sustained so long that it causes insanity (the Longbottoms), but it's torture, nevertheless, and the ruthless Voldemort needs no other means of punishing his followers when they fail him. 

Even if it lasts only three seconds, those three seconds (which surely feel more like three minutes to the victim) are three seconds of unendurable agony.

"Crucio" *means* "I torture" and "Cruciatus" is a real Latin word meaning "torture" or "torment." The successful caster *must* want his victim to suffer unendurable agony, as Bellatrix knows well and as the name itself should be sufficient to inform us. (Even if we don't know Latin, we should see the etymological connection with "excruciating.")

Harry, who did not even connect Amycus with the Crucio he still thinks was inflicted by Snape, has no better reason for torturing him than that he spat on McGonagall (and, possibly, though he doesn't say so, that Amycus used that curse on Harry's schoolmates). Harry is not just taking justice into his own hands, he is performing an act of revenge on a man against whom he has no personal grudge. He's a Death Eater who has performed the Cruciatus Curse; therefore, in Harry's literally hot-headed view of the moment, he deserves a taste of his own medicine. He deserves to suffer agonizing pain rather than merely be put out of action by the more effective and appropriate means of a Stunning or Freezing spell.

Harry is, IMO, scapegoating Amycus, taking revenge against him because he can, when he really wants (and has wanted throughout the book) to take revenge against Snape. He wants to cause the same unendurable agony that he, himself has experienced. His action is beyond "foolish," and it is most certainly not "gallant," whatever the deluded McGonagall may think. (If the Chosen One casts Unforgiveable Curses with no repercussions, it must be okay for her, too.)

Harry, I think, learns his lesson with his visit to Snape's memories in the Pensieve. At any rate, from that point on, he no longer seeks revenge or attempts to cast any Unforgiveable Curses even after he returns from King's cross, having chosen to sacrifice himself rather than fight. His last, best hope in the final battle is not a Killing Curse but Expelliarmus, and rather than seeking to punish Voldemort for his sins (which are far greater than Amycus's), he offers him his one chance for redemption.

Harry's action in Crucioing Amycus may be understandable, but it can't be justified as necessary when ordinary defensive spells intended for the purpose of disabling an enemy would have served his purpose more effectively. (He's lucky that Amycus hit his head and was knocked out.) It's a clear case of choosing "easy" (and wrong) over right. And I think that Harry's later rejection of the Elder Wand is a silent acknowledgment that it's all too easy for the good guys to stoop to using Dark spells and Dark weapons, and he wants no part of that.

I am certain that we are meant to be shocked by Harry's action (and McGonagall's) and to consider them not evil but mistaken in their choice to use Unforgiveable Curses when other spells would have been equally effective.

That aside, Harry *did* knowingly and deliberately torture Amycus. It's perhaps as lucky for Harry as for his victim that Amycus hit his head against that bookcase.

Carol, by no means excusing Amycus and concerned only with Harry in this post




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May  6 19:35:33 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 19:35:33 -0000
Subject: MAGICkal elITE - The Boy, The Man, The Hero, the Saint.
In-Reply-To: <7ef72f90905060730uc2f4cf8w905f0a241db7b3d3@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <gtsoq5+mlnt@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186463

No.Limberger wrote:
> In earlier thread (a few weeks back), I believe you referenced the following site as a source for the definition of a "Christ figure": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_figure.
> 
> Here is that definition taken directly from Wikipedia:
> "A *Christ figure* is a literary technique that authors use to draw allusions between their characters and the biblical Jesus Christ."
> 
> No where does this definition indicate what can or cannot be used as a basis for comparison, nor is there an indication that any particular individual or group has been authorized to make such determinations. <snip>
> In other words, it is in the eye of the beholder, which is what I have repeated stated in past postings on this subject, but have been told by several that that view is wrong.
> 
> IMO, those that prefer use of the term "Christ figure" are alluding only to a single similarity: that of Harry dying and coming back to life.  They often also make references to a scant number of biblical quotations, as well as comments made by JK Rowling.  

Carol responds:
So far, so good. No one is stating that Harry is Christ, only that, like Christ, he sacrificed himself for the good of others and that his encounter with the dead Dumbledore at "King's Cross" and his return to the WW *can be viewed* as a symbolic resurrection. That much is sufficient to qualify him as a Christ figure as that term is generally used. And vague or not, the concept of Christ figure is common in literary criticism and it is applicable here for those who choose to apply it. Moreover, as you note, the biblical quotations and JKR's own comments indicate that she intended this parallel. It's there for those who wish to see it and for whom it is meaningful. In fact, even readers for whom it isn't meaningful have noted that they clearly see it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "any individual or group being authorized to make such determinations." JKR can certainly state her intentions (whether the reader agrees with them or not depends on how the reader interprets the evidence presented in the books), and any reader, whether a professional literary critic or a member of HPfGu, is "authorized" to interpret the books. That does not mean that just any interpretation is valid. I doubt, for example, that I could find sufficient canonical evidence to convince anyone that Wormtail is a Christ figure or that Scrimgeour is the real hero of the books. A valid interpretation is an interpretation that can be supported with sufficient evidence to persuade at least some readers to view the book in that way. And since many readers can see the evidence for Harry as Christ figure, it's a valid interpretation. It is not, however, the definitive interpretation, just one way in which the books can be read that happens to be meaningful to some readers.

You say that this interpretation is "in the eye of the beholder." Yes and no. Yes, not everyone will accept this interpretation, and you have every right to reject an interpretation that isn't meaningful to you. But, no, in the sense that your objection to the Christ figure interpretation does not make that interpretation invalid. The evidence to support that reading still exists, both in the text itself and in JKR's stated intentions. By the same token, I disagree with and reject alchemical interpretations, but I can't deny that the evidence for such interpretations can be found in the text. They are, therefore, valid interpretations even though they are not meaningful to me.

Only an interpretation that can't be supported (e.g., the Harry Potter books will encourage children to practice witchcraft) is invalid. Such interpretations can be proven wrong by evidence within the text (in this case, Muggles can't perform magic).

No. Limberger:
> The purpose, then, is not to use the term "Christ figure" as merely a literary comparison (a comparison that I personally find no relevant value given the weakness of the definition itself), but to imply a more deliberate attempt by JKR to use the Harry Potter books a means to promote Christianity itself.  This is something that I completely disagree with. <snip>

Carol responds:
Can you explain where you got this idea? "Christ figure" *is* "merely a literary comparison," regardless of whether you feel that the definition is weak. "Christ figure" is merely a term that can be applied to a literary character as a means of understanding how that character functions in the novel or other literary work.

The idea that JKR is using the books to promote Christianity is a completely unrelated concept. (Are you talking about John Granger? It's unclear where this idea came from.)

It would help if you could quote the person (certainly not me!) who has argued that the HP books are "a means to promote Christianity itself" and answer that person's arguments using canonical evidence. Do you have some other explanation for the sudden appearance of biblical quotations, crosses, and other Christian motifs in DH? (I would argue that they're part of the cultural context of the WW and Muggle England rather than a means of indoctrinating the reader.)

At any rate, stating that Harry is or can be viewed as a Christ figure is by no means the same thing as saying that the HP books are a Christian tract intended to indoctrinate young readers. No one, to my knowledge, is arguing that they're any such thing.

Carol earlier:
> >And I have yet to hear any Christian complain that a Christ figure "waters down" the concept of Christ.
> 
> No.Limberger responds:
> Certainly those who have used the term as a way to promote Christianity itself would not say that.

Carol:
Who are these mysterious people? It would help if you could identify and quote them. Otherwise, you seem to be arguing against a straw man.

Carol, still mystified as to where this Christian tract idea is coming from




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Wed May  6 21:11:35 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 21:11:35 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtsgek+u2hu@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtsue7+68r2@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186464


> Magpie:
> Some children are, I know. And yet McGonagall, the character that JKR has in the scene with him, calls his action gallant. And in an interview JKR reacts to children's shock with "Well, he's never been a saint." I just don't see this scene written at all as intending to shock anybody with Harry's sadism and cruelty. The book's YA at this point even. 

Pippin:
Of course it's YA -- it's fantasy violence.

But what would Neville say? Wouldn't he sound a lot like Harry sounds earlier in the book, after he's read Rita Skeeter's version of Dumbledore's youth? Here's Neville risking his neck so that crucio won't be used as a punishment, and meanwhile Harry, his hero, is blasting a DE just for fun. I seriously doubt that Neville would cheer if he knew. 

"Saint" is used sarcastically several times in canon. And each time, it's in the context of  doing something which the speaker thinks is seriously wrong, not some minor violation of the rules that only a prig like Percy would disapprove of. The contexts are stealing the philosopher's stone,  attempted murder, and the Dumbledore family's treatment and possible murder of Ariana. 

Pippin






From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Wed May  6 22:56:15 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 22:56:15 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtqr2e+fjq6@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtt4if+msgq@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186465

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "montavilla47" <montavilla47 at ...> wrote:
>
> > Montavilla47:
> But "saying bad things" about a person doesn't necessarily
> equate to holding a grudge.  McGonagall says that James
> and Sirius were troublemakers, but she didn't dislike them.
> 
> Of course, Snape doesn't like James at all.  I daresay he
> still does hate him.  But that's not the same as holding a 
> grudge, or worse, nursing it.  And it's certainly a far
> cry from allowing it to blight and waste you life.
> 
> And that's really the part I take issue with.  Look, I 
> can still get annoyed when I think about the way my
> mother gave away that favorite toy of mine when 
> I was six years old.  (And I do.... on occasion.)
> 
> If I were really mad at her, I might even bring it up.
> But that doesn't mean I'm twisted up with hatred
> and holding a grudge, I hope.  It simply means that
> when we get angry we tend to bring up things that
> happened in the past--whether or not they 
> pertain. 
> 

jkoney:
The definition I found for grudge is "a deep seated feeling of resentment or rancor."

After a decade of James being dead any thoughts of James should have been put to rest. But they aren't they are transferred to Harry. While we talked about the celebrity comment there was still no need for it other than to take a cheap shot at a Potter. 

This and his other thoughts/actions show that the grudge is still there able to be brought to the forefront of his mind when the need arises.

> 
> > Alla:
> > >
> > > You are right, Snape has a lot of reasons to be angry in this scene, however
> > the reasons he **says** that he is angry about are :
> > > a) Harry is using his spells against him;
> > > b) His filfy father was using his spells against him.
> > 
> 
> Montavilla47:
> Well, the best misdirection is going to be truthful, rather
> than an out and out lie.  But it's a matter of degree.  I just
> don't think it's that big a thing.  Snape's dealing with a lot
> of stuff--and if he had to rank the things upsetting him
> at that moment, James's use of Levicorpus twenty years
> earlier would probably rank far behind:
> 
> 1. Having to kill Dumbledore
> 2. Having to become a fugitive
> 3. Having to get that idiot Malfoy to a safe place
> 4. Having to keep the DEs from killing anyone
> 5. Having to keep the DEs from killing that idiot Potter
> 6. Wondering if Hagrid knows how to put out a fire
> 7. Trying to avoid the hippogriff poo littering the grass
> 8. Oh, yeah.  That idiot Potter is flinging spells at him.
> 

jkoney:
No one is arguing that it is a huge thing just that it still exists. He did have other things on his mind at the end of HBP, but the comment he makes is about James. If the resentment wasn't there, then the comment wouldn't have been made.


> > Montavilla47:
> > <SNIP>
> > I think it's a bit too hard to argue Snape as a noble character--
> > in the sense of being forgiving or magnanimous. I don't see him
> > as being forgiving at all--least of all to himself. But if you don't
> > re-examine his character in light of the Prince's Tale, then you're
> > holding onto a false interpretation of his character. The whole
> > point of the Prince's Tale is to change our view of Snape.
> > 
>snip> 
> Montavilla47:
> There's a lot of room between "completely" and "at all."  Obviously,
> Snape isn't going to change completely.  In fact, he's not to change 
> at all.  It's our view that is intended to change.  Hopefully, it will
> change in a direction that will make it seem plausible that Harry
> names one of his sons after the man.  
> 
>snip> 

jkoney:
The Prince's Tale doesn't change my opinion that much. We find out that Snape wasn't always evil. He started off as a normal boy, he chose the DE's and committed who knows what atrocities, and then repented because Voldemort was going to and did kill his childhood friend. We also find out that he has been working with and was loyal to Dumbledore.

That still wasn't enough for me to forget that he was an arrogant ass most of the time.


 
> Montavilla47:
> I don't know.  Sirius managed a good grudge against
> Peter that lasted at least twelves years and nearly 
> caused him to murder the rat.  
> 
>
jkoney:
Well someone turning over my best friends to be killed seems like a good reason to me to hold a grudge.




From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Wed May  6 23:32:37 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 23:32:37 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gts6db+3pji@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtt6ml+sdj4@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186466

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "sistermagpie" <sistermagpie at ...> wrote:
>
> > Magpie continues:
> > 
> > >I agree every thing happens in context. I don't think every
> > > act done in HP is justified by the context. The fact that a
> > > circumstance is unusual or the person uses restraint when 
> > > they hit the torture button doesn't necessarily make it 
> > > admirable or not troubling. Maybe it's forgivable, but that
> > > doesn't really mean somebody's necessarily going to approve 
> > > of what was done in the fictional story as a good thing. 
> > 
> > bboyminn:
> > 
> > Oddly, on this we agree, I didn't mean to imply that it was
> > OK for Harry to do what he did. It was wrong, especially when
> > he had other choice available to him, but it was also 
> > understandable, and it occurred under mitigating circumstances.
> > And I think the Wizard World understands those mitigating
> > circumstances and forgives the act. But while they forgive it,
> > they also disapprove of it and condemn it as wrong. They
> > socially and perhaps morally condemn it as wrong, but in a
> > practical sense, and in a legal sense, they understand it
> > and the circumstances, and are willing to let it go.
> 
> > If, Harry or McGonagall had sustained their action, or been
> > brutal or cruel, then it would have been a different story.
> > They both showed restraint relative to what those curses 
> > could have done. In neither case was any real harm done. In
> > neither case, was the 'victim' make to suffer beyond what was
> > clearly necessary. Again, I ask as I've asked before, if it
> > only last 3 seconds and does no harm, can we really call it
> > torture? 
> 
> Magpie:
> True--though I don't think in the Crucio scene that anybody in the scene thinks it's wrong at all. Harry stands by his action and McGonagall's protests have nothing to do with its being wrong. She describes the action as gallant but foolish (iow, foolish because Harry might have gotten caught).
> 
> Personally, I take the scene as just an action movie moment not unlike the "Not my daughter, you bitch!" moment. I think it's a moment we're supposed to cheer. (And if it's kept in the movie I suspect the screenwriters will set it up to make sure we do.) But I can understand why a lot of people are pulled up by it regardless of no harm done or relative restraint. I do think you can call zapping somebody with a torture curse for 3 seconds torture, just as electrocuting somebody's testicles for 3 seconds would be called torture. Just as everytime Harry's zapped with one for no matter how short a time it seems to be shown as torture. All torture is done under the claim that the victim is not suffering beyond what's "clearly necessary". In the case of Harry's Crucio it's not necessary at all. The guy just deserves some serious pain in Harry's opinion. A stunning spell would have taken care of necessary.

jkoney:
It seems like you are taking it out of context and expanding on it.

Harry's day started with the break in at Gringotts and ended with him finding his friends in the ROR where they are still showing signs of having been tortured. He's also under a time constraint because he needs to find the horcrux as soon as possible because Voldemort has just been told that Harry is at the castle. Standing in front of him is the person who tortured his friends and who is now spitting in the face of McGonagall.  Harry then takes of the cloak and tells Carrow that he shouldn't have done that. Carrow turns and Harry curses him.

Harry hit him with the curse and stopped. There was no excess time, no targeting his testicles, eyes, etc. It was if Harry had TASERed him. People don't consider a TASER a form of torture, unless someone does it repeatedly for a long time. That didn't happen here.

Could Harry have used some other spell, yes. He could have aimed a reductor curse at his head or a cutting curse at his neck. The restraint he showed was admirable.

Now looking at it after the fact as an univolved spectator people can say that if he was really good he would have stunned him and forgiven him for his actions.

That would have been a plastic hero. Someone everyone would have complained about for being too perfect.

Maybe what JKR was showing is that no one is perfect, especially in war. No one is unaffected (unchanged?) by being involved in war. 

> Magpie:
> The scene didn't particularly bother me. Like I said I just thought it was an action movie moment. But I think, also, that people have meta-objections to the idea of the author setting up this curse the way she did and then wanting her hero to be able to throw it to show how cool he was. I think that's probably where a lot of readers come from when they don't like the scene. They know Harry's supposed to be cool in that scene and that didn't work for them. 

jkoney:
I don't think she was trying to show that Harry was cool in that scene. I also don't think it was an action movie moment, but a very realistic response in the context of the situation.




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 00:14:42 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 00:14:42 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtt6ml+sdj4@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtt95i+4shu@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186467

> jkoney:
> It seems like you are taking it out of context and expanding on it.
> 
> Harry's day started with the break in at Gringotts and ended with him finding his friends in the ROR where they are still showing signs of having been tortured. He's also under a time constraint because he needs to find the horcrux as soon as possible because Voldemort has just been told that Harry is at the castle. Standing in front of him is the person who tortured his friends and who is now spitting in the face of McGonagall.  <SNIP> Could Harry have used some other spell, yes. He could have aimed a reductor curse at his head or a cutting curse at his neck. The restraint he showed was admirable.
<SNIP>

Alla:

LOL, last sentence was funny. I agree with you for the most part except that I do not think that Harry showed restraint here and no, I do not need him to be perfect at all. But to me it is as simple as that - I think Harry's anger built up since he saw Neville with the signs of prolonged torture on him IMO and exploded when Carrow spit on Mcgonagall. No way I will ever be convinced that him spitting on Mcgonagall was the only reason, to me it was the last drop.

However, however again I wonder why we need characters to say that it was wrong to agree that author thinks it is wrong.

I guess I just give her more credit than that for subtlety. No, I am not saying that she sends extremely complicated messages for the most part, no. I am saying that the books are series, not the single volume and IMO if something was said or even hinted at in previous books, I think author may want to leave it at that and let us decide the rest.

I mean, forget what Sirius says about Unforgivables, really, Cruciatus is the curse that Neville's parents were tortured in the permanent insanity. Why would I even assume that author says that even brief use of this is okay? Because Mcgonagall does not say so? Eh, she is forced to spend **a year** with Carrows torturing students over and over and over.

I think her judgment could be a little bit strained by that and I totally understand it.

IMO,

Alla






From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 00:31:58 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 00:31:58 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtrfnp+leiv@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtta5u+5b92@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186468

> Montavilla47:
> Well, there was a death involved with Snape, too--at least
> until Snape understood that Sirius hadn't betrayed Lily.  

Zara:
I so agree! It's not so much that there was no grudge, as that there were very serious reasons to feel one. What makes it stand out from any other grudge in the series is neither its intensity or cause, I feel, but the fact that it alone is painted as being over a trivial matter of schoolday rivalry.

> montavilla47:
> And,
> if Snape was holding a grudge against James, I would guess
> that James being stupid enough to refuse Dumbledore's offer
> of secret keeping was a large part of it.  (Isn't that what he
> tells Harry in PoA?  Accusing him of being too proud to 
> accept help or something like that?  I seem to remember
> there being something he mentions about James that relates
> to the secret-keeper debacle.)

> PoA (speaker is Snape):
> "Like father, like son, Potter! I have just saved your neck; you should be thanking me on bended knee! You would have been well served if he'd killed you! You'd have died like your father, too arrogant to believe you might be mistaken in Black -- now get out of the way, or I will make you. GET OUT OF THE WAY, POTTER!"





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 00:46:35 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 00:46:35 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtta5u+5b92@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gttb1b+svlt@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186469

> > Montavilla47:
> > Well, there was a death involved with Snape, too--at least
> > until Snape understood that Sirius hadn't betrayed Lily.  
> 
> Zara:
> I so agree! It's not so much that there was no grudge, as that there were very serious reasons to feel one. What makes it stand out from any other grudge in the series is neither its intensity or cause, I feel, but the fact that it alone is painted as being over a trivial matter of schoolday rivalry.

Alla:

Absolutely, even if we forget about school rivalry (which I do not agree, but for the purpose of this argument am willing to temporarily forget), I agree that mistaken as Snape was he had a very serious reason to have a grudge against Sirius who supposedly betrayed Lily.

What serious reason of such magnanimity existed to have a grudge against James? Besides school rivalry of course.

Zara:
> > PoA (speaker is Snape):
> > "Like father, like son, Potter! I have just saved your neck; you should be thanking me on bended knee! You would have been well served if he'd killed you! You'd have died like your father, too arrogant to believe you might be mistaken in Black -- now get out of the way, or I will make you. GET OUT OF THE WAY, POTTER!"
>


Alla:

Yes, lovely quote, isn't it? But how about Snape saying - you would have died as your father because I told Voldemort about prophecy? I mean, I know that plot cannot be revealed yet, but he is talking about consequence, not the reason here.

Thus I do not believe that this could be considered as a serious reason, but a very hypocritical one IMO. James refused an offer which was made in the first place because Snape placed them in danger in the first place.

Schoolboy rivalry to me sounds more plausible IMO.




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 01:37:35 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 01:37:35 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gttb1b+svlt@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtte0v+avfc@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186470

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
>
> > > Montavilla47:
> > > Well, there was a death involved with Snape, too--at least
> > > until Snape understood that Sirius hadn't betrayed Lily.  
> > 
> > Zara:

> > > PoA (speaker is Snape):
> > > "Like father, like son, Potter! I have just saved your neck; you should be thanking me on bended knee! You would have been well served if he'd killed you! You'd have died like your father, too arrogant to believe you might be mistaken in Black -- now get out of the way, or I will make you. GET OUT OF THE WAY, POTTER!"
> >
> 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Yes, lovely quote, isn't it? But how about Snape saying - you would have died as your father because I told Voldemort about prophecy? I mean, I know that plot cannot be revealed yet, but he is talking about consequence, not the reason here.
> 
> Thus I do not believe that this could be considered as a serious reason, but a very hypocritical one IMO. James refused an offer which was made in the first place because Snape placed them in danger in the first place.
> 
> Schoolboy rivalry to me sounds more plausible IMO.
>
Carol responds:
"You'd have died like your father before you too arrogant to believe you might be mistaken in Black" clearly indicates that Snape is referring to Black as the Secret Keeper who (he thinks) betrayed the Potters, not to any schoolboy rivalry or even what he regards, rightly or wrongly, as Black's attempt to murder him in the so-called Prank.

However, I agree with you that there's an element of hypocrisy here, or perhaps scapegoating is a better word. Just as Harry prefers to blame Snape for Black's death rather than admitting his own share of the blame, Snape is conveniently forgetting that his revealing the Prophecy to Voldemort sent Voldemort after the Potters in the first place. It's too painful to remember that the Potters might still be alive if he hadn't eavesdropped and revealed what he heard. It's easier to think that he went to Dumbledore to try to protect Lily ("her--them") once he found out who was being targeted and that his efforts and Dumbledore's were defeated because the Potters' trusted friend betrayed them.

IMO, and I'm quite aware that I'm only speculating, blaming Black for the Potters' deaths enabled him to live with himself all those years--as, of course, did his promise to protect Lily so that her death wouldn't be in vain. Otherwise, his remorse would have been unbearable.

That's why, in my opinion only, it's so difficult for Snape to believe anything that he hears in the Shrieking Shack. Only the shock of seeing the black dog transform into Sirius Black causes him to realize, at last, that he's been wrong all those years. At that point, or soon after when he encounters Pettigrew alive and with Voldemort, he has to rethink his views. Pettigrew, as we see from "Spinner's End," merits only his contempt. And Black reverts to a schoolboy rival who still calls him "Snivellus" and tried to "murder" him when they were both sixteen.

So, yes, there's a degree of hypocrisy here, but there's also the need for a scapegoat to enable him to live with himself. Lupin does much the same thing in blaming Snape for "outing" him, as if that revelation weren't inevitable, along with the loss of his post, because of his own irresponsible actions.

Scapegoating is an all too common and all too human response to sins and errors whose burden is too great to bear, and we see it even in Harry.

Carol, who still thinks that the schoolboy rivalry in the Shrieking Shack scene is misdirection and by no means accounts for the intensity of Snape's fury




From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Thu May  7 01:57:19 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 01:57:19 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtsue7+68r2@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gttf5v+rq7p@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186471

> > Magpie:
> > Some children are, I know. And yet McGonagall, the character that JKR has in the scene with him, calls his action gallant. And in an interview JKR reacts to children's shock with "Well, he's never been a saint." I just don't see this scene written at all as intending to shock anybody with Harry's sadism and cruelty. The book's YA at this point even. 
> 
> Pippin:
> Of course it's YA -- it's fantasy violence.

Magpie:
I mean it's YA so why would JKR be writing primarily for the reactions of young children? YA is for older kids.

Pippin: 
> But what would Neville say? Wouldn't he sound a lot like Harry sounds earlier in the book, after he's read Rita Skeeter's version of Dumbledore's youth? Here's Neville risking his neck so that crucio won't be used as a punishment, and meanwhile Harry, his hero, is blasting a DE just for fun. I seriously doubt that Neville would cheer if he knew. 

Magpie:
I think Neville would grimly back Harry up. He's fighting to keep the students from being forced to practice them on others. If Harry did it in this instance I think Neville would grimly stand by the action and maybe even compliment him on it.

Pippin: 
> "Saint" is used sarcastically several times in canon. And each time, it's in the context of  doing something which the speaker thinks is seriously wrong, not some minor violation of the rules that only a prig like Percy would disapprove of. The contexts are stealing the philosopher's stone,  attempted murder, and the Dumbledore family's treatment and possible murder of Ariana. 

Magpie:
In the context that JKR uses it in the interview I think it sounds pretty breezy. She's not being sarcastic that I can see (if she's being sarcastic then she's claiming Harry is a saint.) He's never been a saint and he's got a temper. I don't remember exactly how people use the term in those other instances, so I don't know if they're being defensive.

jkoney:
It seems like you are taking it out of context and expanding on it.

Harry's day started with the break in at Gringotts and ended with him finding his friends in the ROR where they are still showing signs of having been tortured. He's also under a time constraint because he needs to find the horcrux as soon as possible because Voldemort has just been told that Harry is at the castle. Standing in front of him is the person who tortured his friends and who is now spitting in the face of McGonagall. Harry then takes of the cloak and tells Carrow that he shouldn't have done that. Carrow turns and Harry curses
him.

Harry hit him with the curse and stopped. There was no excess time, no targeting his testicles, eyes, etc. It was if Harry had TASERed him. People don't consider a TASER a form of torture, unless someone does it repeatedly for a long time.
That didn't happen here.

Magpie:
I don't think I'm taking anything out of context or exaggerating it. First, Harry's bad day has little to do with the definition of Crucio. I know he's in a bad mood, I know he's emotional, and I know he's angry when Carrow spits on McGonagall.

Harry uses the curse named for the Latin word for torture. A curse that we've seen numerous times in canon, and never for more than a few seconds. But only in this instance is it suddenly not torture because it didn't last a long time. 

The point of the testicle comment was that it was designed for maximum suffering even in small bursts. Torture is used to cause pain. Harry's experience of Crucio shows us that this is torture--far worse than the testicle electrode, actually. Agonizing pain you think you're going to die from. A spell about wanting to cause pain, that's named after the word for that concept. Why would I dial it down to taser for Harry?

jkoney:
Now looking at it after the fact as an univolved spectator people can say that if he was really good he would have stunned him and forgiven him for his actions.

That would have been a plastic hero. Someone everyone would have complained about for being too perfect.

Magpie:
You think a hero is plastic or unbelievable and "too perfect" because he doesn't react to somebody spitting at his teacher by using the torture curse? I don't believe for one second that anybody would have read a scene where Harry used one of the dozens of spells more about disabling or knocking Carrow out and said it was the least bit unbelievable, or that it made Harry too perfect. JKR's the one who made a big deal about this being the torture curse and named it after that concept. 

There doesn't seem to be a problem describing it as torture in any other instance. Was Voldemort only tasering Harry so it was no big deal in GoF? 

Also, if Harry's showing restraint in the scene, how is the scene about showing him not being perfect? Maybe it's showing he's not perfect in the sense of not having to be a boy scout that nobody would want him to be (and that he wouldn't be anyway), but not showing any particular flaws if he's actually showing restraint and doing the only realistic thing. (Hell, Carrow's showing even more restraint by merely spitting on McGonagall--he probably could have pulled out the cutting curse too.)
-m




From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 07:32:51 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 07:32:51 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtt4if+msgq@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtu2r3+10u5b@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186472

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "jkoney65" <jkoney65 at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "montavilla47" <montavilla47@> wrote:
> >
> > > Montavilla47:
> > But "saying bad things" about a person doesn't necessarily
> > equate to holding a grudge.  McGonagall says that James
> > and Sirius were troublemakers, but she didn't dislike them.
> > 
> > Of course, Snape doesn't like James at all.  I daresay he
> > still does hate him.  But that's not the same as holding a 
> > grudge, or worse, nursing it.  And it's certainly a far
> > cry from allowing it to blight and waste you life.
> > 
> > And that's really the part I take issue with.  Look, I 
> > can still get annoyed when I think about the way my
> > mother gave away that favorite toy of mine when 
> > I was six years old.  (And I do.... on occasion.)
> > 
> > If I were really mad at her, I might even bring it up.
> > But that doesn't mean I'm twisted up with hatred
> > and holding a grudge, I hope.  It simply means that
> > when we get angry we tend to bring up things that
> > happened in the past--whether or not they 
> > pertain. 
> > 
> 
> jkoney:
> The definition I found for grudge is "a deep seated feeling of resentment or rancor."
> 
> After a decade of James being dead any thoughts of James should have been put to rest. But they aren't they are transferred to Harry. While we talked about the celebrity comment there was still no need for it other than to take a cheap shot at a Potter. 
> 
> This and his other thoughts/actions show that the grudge is still there able to be brought to the forefront of his mind when the need arises.

Montavilla47:

Well, yeah.  But that's normal human behavior.  If, for 
example, you had a sweetheart in high school, who married
the quarterback of the football team and then one day, he 
had too much to drink and drove their car into a tree, you 
might have some resentments towards him, too.

Even if you served him the drinks.

Nobody would get over that kind of thing easily.
But I'll bet you'd be angrier over him driving drunk and
killing your old sweetheart than you would because he
used to give you wedgies.  

But, Snape is singled out as "wasting his life" over
a grudge which is, even after the Prince's Tale, linked by
many fans to those wedgies.  

This is because we were told by two characters who 
seemed very trustworthy, that Snape's feelings were
connected most strongly to the Prank.  But, we see in his
memories that the Prank was only secondary.  The 
important thing to him was that Lily died.  That's 
what caused grief so profound that he could barely
live through it  

And those two characters who set us up to think it 
was all about the Prank or, even more absurdly, 
Quidditch?  One was Dumbledore and he was deliberately
misleading Harry (at Snape's request).  The other was 
Lupin and he was simply going on what he knew--which
was not the complete story.



> jkoney:
> No one is arguing that it is a huge thing just that it still exists. He did have other things on his mind at the end of HBP, but the comment he makes is about James. If the resentment wasn't there, then the comment wouldn't have been made.

Montavilla47:
If you agree that Snape's grudge against James isn't a huge
thing, then we are in agreement.  

Again, I posted in response to someone saying that 
Snape served as an example of someone who had "wasted
their life" in senseless grudges against dead people.  

My argument is that the the grudge business was
blown out of proportion in order to distract from what
was really bothering Snape--which was that Voldemort
killed the girl he loved.  

And, of course, that he was protecting Harry throughout
the series--up until the moment when he delivered his 
memory/message about Harry having to die.  

> > > Montavilla47:
> > > <SNIP>
> > > I think it's a bit too hard to argue Snape as a noble character--
> > > in the sense of being forgiving or magnanimous. I don't see him
> > > as being forgiving at all--least of all to himself. But if you don't
> > > re-examine his character in light of the Prince's Tale, then you're
> > > holding onto a false interpretation of his character. The whole
> > > point of the Prince's Tale is to change our view of Snape.
> > > 
> >snip> 
> > Montavilla47:
> > There's a lot of room between "completely" and "at all."  Obviously,
> > Snape isn't going to change completely.  In fact, he's not to change 
> > at all.  It's our view that is intended to change.  Hopefully, it will
> > change in a direction that will make it seem plausible that Harry
> > names one of his sons after the man.  
> > 
> >snip> 
> 
> jkoney:
> The Prince's Tale doesn't change my opinion that much. We find out that Snape wasn't always evil. He started off as a normal boy, he chose the DE's and committed who knows what atrocities, and then repented because Voldemort was going to and did kill his childhood friend. We also find out that he has been working with and was loyal to Dumbledore.
> 
> That still wasn't enough for me to forget that he was an arrogant ass most of the time.

Montavilla47:

It's a pretty difficult thing to pull off the the transformation
of the reader's intrepretation of Snape.  It's not quite we weren't
debating the topic hotly for the two years between HBP and DH.

In order to be surprised by the memories, you would have had
to have not read any articles or discussed the books--because
it was the biggest question coming out HBP.  And kudos to 
Papa Rushdie for asking it publically.

And even I'm not going to force anyone to re-examine the books
in light of Snape's memories.  After all, do people need to 
go back and re-think Croody bouncing Draco off the stone floor
in GoF once they realize that he's someone different than they 
thought he was the first time they read that chapter?  No, of 
course not.  

I consider it more fun to go back and consider different 
motivations and perspectives.  But you're not *obligated*
to do it, just because I like it.

On the other hand, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to 
offer what I was careful to call an "alternative" interpretation.

> > Montavilla47:
> > I don't know.  Sirius managed a good grudge against
> > Peter that lasted at least twelves years and nearly 
> > caused him to murder the rat.  
> > 
> >
> jkoney:
> Well someone turning over my best friends to be killed seems like a good reason to me to hold a grudge.

Montavilla47:

Sirius believes that Peter turned over his best friends
to Voldemort.  Which, you seem to be saying, makes a 
grudge against Peter reasonable.

In the Shrieking Shack, Snape believes that Sirius
turned his best friend over to Voldemort.  So, then,
shouldn't Snape's grudge be just as reasonable?




From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 13:24:32 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 13:24:32 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gttb1b+svlt@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtuneg+nj1m@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186473

> > > PoA (speaker is Snape):
> > > "Like father, like son, Potter! I have just saved your neck; you should be thanking me on bended knee! You would have been well served if he'd killed you! You'd have died like your father, too arrogant to believe you might be mistaken in Black -- now get out of the way, or I will make you. GET OUT OF THE WAY, POTTER!"
> >
> 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Yes, lovely quote, isn't it? But how about Snape saying - you would have died as your father because I told Voldemort about prophecy? I mean, I know that plot cannot be revealed yet, but he is talking about consequence, not the reason here.
> 
> Thus I do not believe that this could be considered as a serious reason, but a very hypocritical one IMO. James refused an offer which was made in the first place because Snape placed them in danger in the first place.

Zara:
There is a death there.

I don't see how this is any odder/more hypocritical/less believable, than Harry deciding arbitrarily that Snape, who in fact checked on Sirius's safety and sent the Order to rescue Harry, is to be hated for causing Sirius's death after OotP.






From foxmoth at qnet.com  Thu May  7 13:29:59 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 13:29:59 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gttf5v+rq7p@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtunon+qa88@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186474

 
> > 
> > Pippin:
> > Of course it's YA -- it's fantasy violence.
> 
> Magpie:
> I mean it's YA so why would JKR be writing primarily for the reactions of young children? YA is for older kids.

Pippin:
Older kids wouldn't need to have Harry's lust characterized as a chest monster. Ron's language is obviously sanitized (and would surely have undercut Molly's big line if it wasn't. Can you imagine  *not* calling Umbridge a b-?) The books are eight and up, methinks. 

> Magpie:
> I think Neville would grimly back Harry up. He's fighting to keep the students from being forced to practice them on others. If Harry did it in this instance I think Neville would grimly stand by the action and maybe even compliment him on it.

Pippin:
Gee, and the kids made such a point in OOP that Dumbledore's Army was about fighting the Dark Arts, not about student rights. When do you see them having this change of motivation?

> 
> Magpie:
> In the context that JKR uses it in the interview I think it sounds pretty breezy. She's not being sarcastic that I can see (if she's being sarcastic then she's claiming Harry is a saint.) He's never been a saint and he's got a temper. I don't remember exactly how people use the term in those other instances, so I don't know if they're being defensive.
> 

Pippin:
' "Honestly, Hermione, you think all teachers are saints or something," snapped Ron.' PS/SS ch 11, reacting to Hermione's contention that Snape wouldn't steal something that Dumbledore was trying to keep safe.

"Then let me correct you -- your saintly father and his friends played a highly amusing joke on me that would have resulted in my death if your father hadn't got cold feet at the last moment." -- ch 14 PoA

"Oh, we all know you worshipped Dumbledore; I daresay you'll still think he was a saint even if it does turn out that he did away with his Squib sister." -- Muriel, DH ch 8

Outside of the  religious senses, my dictionary says a saint is an extremely virtuous person. That's the way it seems to be used here, meaning someone so virtuous that it's unthinkable that they could do something seriously wrong. You seem to think JKR is using it to mean a character that's unrealistically good, or someone so good that their virtue makes people uncomfortable. But it's not used that way in the books. 

Wouldn't it undermine the idea of second chances if JKR didn't trust the ability of the audience to pick up on a moral lapse without having someone  point it out to them?  

If there has to be a rebuke or a punishment or an expression of guilt for us to know that wrong has been done, then there is no interior moral sense. In that case, second chances would corrupt people's values by teaching them that no wrong has been done as long as the person in question gets away with it and feels  okay afterward.  But JKR evidently does not agree. 

Pippin





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 13:40:07 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 13:40:07 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtuneg+nj1m@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtuobn+tskk@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186475

> Zara:
> There is a death there.
> 
> I don't see how this is any odder/more hypocritical/less believable, than Harry deciding arbitrarily that Snape, who in fact checked on Sirius's safety and sent the Order to rescue Harry, is to be hated for causing Sirius's death after OotP.

Alla:

Yes, there is a death here, but the death for which Snape is to blame first and foremost, maybe less than Voldemort but certainly more than James. So if Snape was holding a grudge against **James** of all people, who died because of him, I think Snape should hold a grudge against himself.

And, eh, of course Snape is not to be hated for causing Sirius' death after OOP, because he did not cause Sirius' death. 

My original point was though that I see through the text that Snape was hating James for saving his life and for getting Lily. I can certainly respect his grudges, all of them, just because we cannot help how we feel.

But while I can respect his (what I consider) additional reason for feeling a grudge against Sirius, his (what I feel) additional reason to hold a grudge against James is obnoxiously hypocritical to me. Since James would have not had to refused anything had Snape not done what he did.

So, Absolutely if he hates James for that, it is the same thing as Harry hating him for Sirius' death. However, events preceeding to those events to me are absolutely not the same and Harry's mind being assaulted by Voldemort is to me very far from Snape setting Voldemort on Potters.

JMO,

Alla




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Thu May  7 13:53:30 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 13:53:30 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtu2r3+10u5b@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtup4q+s99m@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186476

 
> Montavilla47:
> But, Snape is singled out as "wasting his life" over
> a grudge which is, even after the Prince's Tale, linked by
> many fans to those wedgies.  

Pippin:
As the someone in question, I want to make it clear that I didn't mean Snape's whole life was a waste, just that the waste was life long. And I also don't think the grudge was just about the prank, or James's schoolboy arrogance. 

It was about  James's arrogance in refusing to believe that someone close to him had turned traitor and was keeping the Dark Lord informed of his and Lily's movements. 

That was the thing for which Snape never forgave James, IMO, much as the thing for which Harry was never going to forgive Snape was goading Sirius to go to the MoM, not the way Snape treated him as a student.   I agree  that clinging to the grudge was a defense mechanism in both cases. I think Harry was able to face his own guilt and let go of that grudge once he recognized that Sirius was flawed, too, a realization that Snape was never able to come to about Lily, except perhaps at his very last moment.

I think knowing that Sirius was flawed made it possible for Harry to think  that Sirius would understand and forgive him, even though Harry, deceived by the Dark Lord, had helped bring Sirius to his death. 

Pippin





From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Thu May  7 14:42:46 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 14:42:46 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtunon+qa88@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtus16+hp16@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186477

> > Magpie:
> > I think Neville would grimly back Harry up. He's fighting to keep the students from being forced to practice them on others. If Harry did it in this instance I think Neville would grimly stand by the action and maybe even compliment him on it.
> 
> Pippin:
> Gee, and the kids made such a point in OOP that Dumbledore's Army was about fighting the Dark Arts, not about student rights. When do you see them having this change of motivation?

Magpie:
They don't have to change their motivation. Dark Arts is so poorly defined that "fighting Voldemort" means "fighting the Dark Arts" even if you're using unforgivables--as Harry does more than once in canon without being too bothered by it. (He's cracking a few eggs.) We don't know what Neville would have done if he'd been standing next to Harry at that point, but I just don't think it's so unbelievable to imagine him standing by what Harry did. Sure Neville isn't pro-Crucio as a rule, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't give Harry a break in the scene for the same reasons many readers or people on this list do. Harry was angry. Carrow had been doing this to people for a while. He got a taste of his own medicine. It was only for a couple of seconds. 


> > Magpie:
> > In the context that JKR uses it in the interview I think it sounds pretty breezy. She's not being sarcastic that I can see (if she's being sarcastic then she's claiming Harry is a saint.) He's never been a saint and he's got a temper. I don't remember exactly how people use the term in those other instances, so I don't know if they're being defensive.
> > 
> 
> Pippin:
> ' "Honestly, Hermione, you think all teachers are saints or something," snapped Ron.' PS/SS ch 11, reacting to Hermione's contention that Snape wouldn't steal something that Dumbledore was trying to keep safe.
> 
> "Then let me correct you -- your saintly father and his friends played a highly amusing joke on me that would have resulted in my death if your father hadn't got cold feet at the last moment." -- ch 14 PoA
> 
> "Oh, we all know you worshipped Dumbledore; I daresay you'll still think he was a saint even if it does turn out that he did away with his Squib sister." -- Muriel, DH ch 8
> 
> Outside of the  religious senses, my dictionary says a saint is an extremely virtuous person. That's the way it seems to be used here, meaning someone so virtuous that it's unthinkable that they could do something seriously wrong. You seem to think JKR is using it to mean a character that's unrealistically good, or someone so good that their virtue makes people uncomfortable. But it's not used that way in the books. 

Magpie:
All three of those quotes the person is mocking someone else for not believing a person could do anything wrong. Hermione is a fool for thinking a teacher can't do something wrong because he's a teacher. Snape thinks Harry would never think his dad could do anything wrong. Muriel makes the has the same contemptuous view about people and Dumbledore--you can't believe he'd do anything wrong.

To apply that same construction to Harry's scene JKR would have to be answering a person saying that Harry didn't cast a Crucio. Like it must have been someone else or some other curse. Iow, saying that they can't believe Harry did what he did. But the person isn't saying that. They do believe what he did. They're just dismayed that his author had him do it. 

A problem she avoids by answering as if the person was just disbelieving. Iow, she's using the word "saint" here to mean a person who could never do anything wrong. I don't see how that so changes the meaning of what she's saying from how it came across to me the first time. "What, you didn't think Harry could ever do anything bad?" is just as dismissive. It deals with the person's concerns over his behavior by setting up a false comparison to a saint--iow a person so virtuous as to be something more than human. It doesn't at all imply to me that she's agreeing with the reader that we should be disturbed by Harry's action, that it was either OOC for him as a hero or for her as an author based on what she wrote before.

Pippin: 
> Wouldn't it undermine the idea of second chances if JKR didn't trust the ability of the audience to pick up on a moral lapse without having someone  point it out to them?  

Magpie:
There's plenty of things that happen in the books that I think come across as clearly bad without anybody having to point them out. In this case, it's not like I don't think Harry's supposed to having a lapse here. I just think it's the kind of lapse that jkoney describes--a lapse that's not a big deal at all, that's realistic for people in this situation. In fact s/he used the same defense for it, again using the word saint. The difference isn't between thinking Crucio is good or bad--everyone agrees that it's bad. The difference is between whether this is bad in the sense of Crouch using Crucios or bad in the sense of Harry blowing up Aunt Marge or MWPP becoming animagi. I think it's more the latter than the former.

Pippin:
> If there has to be a rebuke or a punishment or an expression of guilt for us to know that wrong has been done, then there is no interior moral sense. In that case, second chances would corrupt people's values by teaching them that no wrong has been done as long as the person in question gets away with it and feels  okay afterward.  But JKR evidently does not agree. 

Magpie:
I think you're giving a blank check to the books to say anything without having to actually say it. Even if they say the opposite that's just tricky JKR putting it on us to figure out that it's supposed to be wrong. I think it's a lot more complex than that. I also think it gives far too much control to the author while giving far too little to the reader. I see nothing in these books to think they're so constantly 8 steps beyond me. The fact that I see nothing in the scene that tells me I should be too worried about Harry's actions here, and that the author's answer to challenges sounds just as breezy is not, imo, evidence that obviously the author's all the time nudging me along the path I think is right. I don't think the lack of subtly throughout the whole series is actually a cover for amazingly subtle books going on underneath. To paraphrase Ron from the above quote, I honestly don't think the author must be a saint or something. I think she just wrote a scene where she had a character use the torture curse and treated it fairly lightly, as not in serious conflict with Harry as hero. And that actually seems pretty consistent throughout the books for me. There's a difference between Crouch's crucios and Harry's. 

-m




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Thu May  7 15:16:16 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 15:16:16 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtuobn+tskk@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtuu00+j63i@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186478

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:

> 
> So, Absolutely if he hates James for that, it is the same thing as Harry hating him for Sirius' death. However, events preceeding to those events to me are absolutely not the same and Harry's mind being assaulted by Voldemort is to me very far from Snape setting Voldemort on Potters.
> 

Pippin:

But would it be from Harry's point of view?

If Harry had done what he was supposed to do and closed his mind to Voldemort's assaults, then he wouldn't have gone to the MoM and Sirius wouldn't have had to rescue him. Harry couldn't do it... he just couldn't. How much of that was Harry not trying  and how much was due to emotional damage, we'll never know and neither can Harry.

But the same is true of Snape becoming a Death Eater. He should have closed his mind to Voldemort's manipulations, but he didn't. How much of that was due to willfulness and how much to emotional damage, we don't know. For certain, Harry can't know. He's in no position to say that anyone should have been strong enough or good enough not to be manipulated by Voldemort or not to give in to reckless hate. 

It's easy to say that you shouldn't hate when you don't know what it is to hate that much. Harry can remember a time when he didn't know, when he felt mostly righteous anger. But Snape, growing up  in circumstances that were in some ways worse than Harry's, probably never had that luxury.

The Dursleys never abused anyone that Harry loved -- they couldn't torture Harry's friends because he didn't have any. Until Cedric was murdered, Harry had no experience of needing to protect someone else and being powerless to do so.  

 But Snape, unable to protect his abused mother, grew up with that. 

Pippin





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 15:20:01 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 15:20:01 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtu2r3+10u5b@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtuu71+780k@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186479

Montavilla47:

Well, yeah. But that's normal human behavior. If, for
example, you had a sweetheart in high school, who married
the quarterback of the football team and then one day, he
had too much to drink and drove their car into a tree, you
might have some resentments towards him, too.

Even if you served him the drinks.

Nobody would get over that kind of thing easily.
But I'll bet you'd be angrier over him driving drunk and
killing your old sweetheart than you would because he
used to give you wedgies.

Alla:

Well, that is if the other reasons for that grudge are dismissed of course, but to me this sounds more like as if your friend, who you would love to be your sweetheart married the quarterback of the football team and you told the gang leader that they did something to try and stop his activities and that gang leader (whose gang you were a member of) decided he is going to come and kill them one day. You warned them that they should go to witness protection program, but the guy refused.

Yeah, I could be angry, but that does not mean that I would not know that I should be angry with myself first and foremost.

Montavilla47:
<SNIP>
It's a pretty difficult thing to pull off the the transformation
of the reader's interpretation of Snape. It's not quite we weren't
debating the topic hotly for the two years between HBP and DH.

In order to be surprised by the memories, you would have had
to have not read any articles or discussed the books--because
it was the biggest question coming out HBP. And kudos to
Papa Rushdie for asking it publically.

And even I'm not going to force anyone to re-examine the books
in light of Snape's memories. After all, do people need to
go back and re-think Croody bouncing Draco off the stone floor
in GoF once they realize that he's someone different than they
thought he was the first time they read that chapter? No, of
course not.

I consider it more fun to go back and consider different
motivations and perspectives. But you're not *obligated*
to do it, just because I like it.

Alla:

It sounds as if this is some sort of complicated task to do. Everybody who rereads the series after DH reads it with new information in mind, no?. The question is whether this information indeed changes the character significantly or at least somewhat. It is not like we  will ever forget that Snape loved Lily and worked for Dumbledore. I mean as you said we debated the topic whether he works for Dumbledore for two years and it is not like even I who really really really wanted him to work for Vodlemort was surprised by this storyline. We figured it out, right? And it was always in my mind as possibility which I hoped will not come true. So it did. But the thing is, it depends on what to you is the core of Snape's character. If you think that he is good because he works for Dumbledore,  then of course his character changed after Prince tale. Or did he? Because for those who thought he was good, they already thought so, right?

But to me, even if I wanted that plot development badly, him working for Voldemort  would have been the icing on the cake.  Before book 7 I saw Snape as nasty man who was capable of hating innocent child on sight because of the history he had with his parents. Said nasty man may have been DE or working for Dumbledore. Nothing in book 7 changed my view of Snape,  as nasty man who was capable of hating innocent child on sight because of the history he had with his parents. Text to me did not disprove it, in fact text provided additional clues to strengthen that interpretation (his indifference to Harry's fate, his indignation ? For him?). I learned that he worked for Dumbledore, but to me the core of his character remained mostly the same.

Do you see why Prince tale cannot change  much my interpretation of his character despite new information that it provided?

Another new (but suspected) information that I learned is that Snape loved Lily. I also learned that he tried to atone for her death in which he was complicit.  But again that makes me hate him more, knowing that he loved Lily and dared to treat her son that way. And every time I read the part where Snape takes from Harry's home part of Lily's letter that makes me very angry. He loved Lily so much that he was quite fine with damaging one of the very few pieces of memories that her son may have of her. And no, I do not think that this letter meant little to Harry, I think it is described in great detail of how much he got from this letter, considering that he had nothing.

One change that Snape's character endured through the books what I can see is learning to value life more of course, from his indifference to James' fate to saving Lupin.

But really, again, to me this is all encompassed in "hated but did not want you dead" line.

So, no, no radical changes in interpretation for me. But you said yourself that you also did not change your opinion much, yours was already high and just went down a little bit. Are you saying that Prince tale indeed was supposed to change Snape's character drastically or just give us more information for what we already saw?

I do agree though that predicting and analyzing storylines will play a part in being surprised, we indeed probably played out every possible scenario. I wonder whether readers who did not do all that were surprised and changed their opinion of Snape.


JMO,

Alla




From sartoris22 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 15:43:11 2009
From: sartoris22 at yahoo.com (sartoris22)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 15:43:11 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtt4if+msgq@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtuvif+aee8@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186480

 Montavilla47:
> There's a lot of room between "completely" and "at all." Obviously,
> Snape isn't going to change completely. In fact, he's not to change 
> at all. It's our view that is intended to change. Hopefully, it will
> change in a direction that will make it seem plausible that Harry
> names one of his sons after the man. 


sartoris22:

I think it impossible for Snape to forgive James because he marries the love of Snape's life. We might argue that Snape should have "moved on," but that's a very modern concept that diminishes the power and pull of love. If Ginny, for some reason, fell in love and married Draco, would we expect Harry to "move on," get over it? Or if Draco married Hermione, would we expect Ron to eventually get over it? In agreement with Montvilla47, I think that,like Harry, we're supposed to change our view of Snape, although I'm sure that there are some readers who liked Snape before HBPor DH. 

We find out in OOTP that James and Sirius picked on Snape. This fact, at least momentarily, changes Harry's view about James. We discover in DH that Snape loved Lily, but his insecurity about being part Muggle, a trait he shares with Voldemort, compels him to hate Muggles, although he is in love with a Muggle, The fact is that Snape, in his own way, is capable of love, a somewhat romantic love. Then we find out that Snape is risking his life as a tribute to that love, which Dumbledore uses to convince Snape to be a spy. In DH, Dumbledore suggests that Snape is warming to Harry, and Snape responds by producing the patronous of the Lily's doe and saying "Always." Snape still loves LIly and doesn't like Harry, but it is curious that at the end of his life, Snape wants Harry to know this loving and courageous aspect of his personality, to reveal, as Dumbledore advices, the better part of himself. By the end of the book, Snape is revealed to be an even more complex character, and our feelings toward him are, in my opinion, supposed to change for the better.













From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 16:39:02 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 16:39:02 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtuobn+tskk@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtv2r6+mmp4@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186481

> > Zara:
> > There is a death there.
> > 
> > I don't see how this is any odder/more hypocritical/less believable, than Harry deciding arbitrarily that Snape, who in fact checked on Sirius's safety and sent the Order to rescue Harry, is to be hated for causing Sirius's death after OotP.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Yes, there is a death here, but the death for which Snape is to blame first and foremost, maybe less than Voldemort but certainly more than James. So if Snape was holding a grudge against **James** of all people, who died because of him, I think Snape should hold a grudge against himself.

Montavilla47:

I think Snape probably does hold a grudge against himself, but 
I think there's a case for holding one against James.  Not a real
good case, but, like Zara said, one similar to the case Harry held
against Snape for Sirius's death.

When Snape realized that Voldemort had decided to target
Harry rather than Neville (I still don't know why a homidical
maniac like Voldemort would limit himself to one baby, when
he could kill two, but... whatever), Snape tried very hard to
prevent Lily from being collateral damage.  

First, he put himself at risk by asking Voldemort to spare her.
As we can see in "The Dark Lord Ascending," (and HBP), 
Voldemort sees personal relationships as weakness.
By admitting to having a personal interest in Lily, Snape
had to know he was setting him (and her) up, should he
ever displease Voldemort.

Second, Snape didn't believe that Voldemort would honor 
his word about letting Lily live, so he risked his life and 
liberty to approach Dumbledore for help.  In return for 
Dumbledore's help, he was prepared to give "anything."  
What followed was sixteen years of service, four of them
in great danger--and, of course, eventually his life.

But he must have comforted himself in the period when
he was working for Dumbledore with the thought that
he had succeeded.  Dumbledore was the most powerful
wizard in the world and he had promised to protect the 
Potters.  

Then he finds out that James refused Dumbledore's help
in favor of trusting Sirius Black--someone Snape knew
to be dangerously reckless and really bad at keeping 
secrets.  

Alla:
> And, eh, of course Snape is not to be hated for causing Sirius' death after OOP, because he did not cause Sirius' death. 
>
> My original point was though that I see through the text that Snape was hating James for saving his life and for getting Lily. I can certainly respect his grudges, all of them, just because we cannot help how we feel.
> 
> But while I can respect his (what I consider) additional reason for feeling a grudge against Sirius, his (what I feel) additional reason to hold a grudge against James is obnoxiously hypocritical to me. Since James would have not had to refused anything had Snape not done what he did.

Montavilla47:

Yes and no... and yes and no.  James and Lily had already "defied" 
Voldemort three times.  So, they were already on the Voldemort 
enemies list.  They weren't, of course, in any more danger than, say,
the Prewetts were before Snape opened his mouth.  

But then, the Prewetts ended up dead as well.  






From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 16:46:52 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 16:46:52 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtv2r6+mmp4@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtv39s+t0cb@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186482

> Montavilla47:
> <SNIP>
> Yes and no... and yes and no.  James and Lily had already "defied" 
> Voldemort three times.  So, they were already on the Voldemort 
> enemies list.  They weren't, of course, in any more danger than, say,
> the Prewetts were before Snape opened his mouth.  
> 
> But then, the Prewetts ended up dead as well.
>

Alla:

Yes, they were on Voldemort's enemies list probably just as any member of the Order and not every order member died in the first war. They only went to hiding after learning about prophecy, so I do not see why you would compare them to Prewetts and say not to Lupin or Mad Eye.

I know that Lupin  and Mad Eye died in the second war, but to me it is more like JKR killing off most of the adults to show off younger generation, I think that there was a very strong possibility that but for Snape they could have been alive at least much longer than they were.

JMO,

Alla




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 17:44:35 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 17:44:35 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtus16+hp16@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtv6m3+iiba@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186483

Magpie wrote:
> <snip> There's plenty of things that happen in the books that I think come across as clearly bad without anybody having to point them out. In this case, it's not like I don't think Harry's supposed to having a lapse here. I just think it's the kind of lapse that jkoney describes--a lapse that's not a big deal at all, that's realistic for people in this situation. In fact s/he used the same defense for it, again using the word saint. The difference isn't between thinking Crucio is good or bad--everyone agrees that it's bad. The difference is between whether this is bad in the sense of Crouch using Crucios or bad in the sense of Harry blowing up Aunt Marge or MWPP becoming animagi. I think it's more the latter than the former.

Carol responds:
The question of authorial intentions is always tricky, especially since such intentions aren't always expressed or even conscious. All we have to go on here is JKR's remark that Harry has never been a saint, which certainly does come through clearly at this moment. (He may be a Christ figure, to revert to that topic for a moment, but he is assuredly not Christ.)

Nevertheless, we readers have been bombarded with evidence throughout books four through six that the Unforgiveable Curses in general and the Cruciatus Curse in particular are horrible. We're forced to make an exception for Snape using an AK on Dumbledore at his command (it seems clear that DD expected that spell and no other), but, in general, we're led to believe that those spells are illegal for good reason, that Crouch Sr. was wrong to authorize their use for Aurors, that his DE son was wrong to use Imperius on his (or rather Moody's) students, and that only Death Eaters generally use them. We're shocked (aren't we? I was) when Harry attempts to use one on Bellatrix and relieved that he failed, not because we fear that he'll be arrested (the Ministry won't know who cast which spell if they can't tell Dobby's Hover Charm from Harry's) but because "righteous anger won't hurt [Bellatrix] for long." Whew! We think. Harry doesn't have it in him to enjoy hurting people, even Bellatrix. Obviously, he's a better person than she is.

Harry, however, doesn't seem to learn this lesson, and keeps on trying to Crucio people (first Snape, unsuccessfully, twice, and then Amycus, successfully). He knows perfectly well what a Crucio feels like, and yet he's willing to use it on other people who, in his view, "deserve" it. He holds Draco Malfoy in contempt for his supposed love of Dark Magic (not demonstrated anywhere that I know of, but, oh, well), yet he uses it himself, not just Crucio but Sectumsempra (admittedly ineffectively on Inferi, but he knows it's Dark magic), and he uses the Imperius Curse, at Griphook's urging, on a DE and an innocent Goblin in DH (admittedly in desperate circumstances, but why not use Confundus instead?). All of this sets us up for Harry's using a successful Crucio on Amycus Carrow, knowing that to cast a successful Crucio he must want to cause excruciating pain, and knowing from Amycus's writhing and howling that that's exactly what he's done.

What, exactly, is going on here? As Magpie states, it appears that JKR
"just wrote a scene where she had a character use the torture curse and treated it fairly lightly, as not in serious conflict with Harry as hero. And that actually seems pretty consistent throughout the books for me."

I can't deny that the Crucio of Amycus Carrow appears to be treated lightly by the good characters (Harry and McGonagall) and by the narrator, who is writing from Harry's point of view. But it doesn't necessarily follow that the *author* considers the Crucio foolish but gallant and approves of McGonagall's following suit and expects the reader to share her judgment. After all, we've seen Harry act mistakenly before, and this action is about as clear an example of "right vs. easy" as we're ever going to see. The HP books are not parables or fables in which the moral is openly stated. The reader in many cases is left to judge for himself whether a particular action is right or wrong. (Take Harry's Sectumsempra, which the characters debate and yet never arrive at the answer I think is correct: It was both wrong and foolish to use an unknown spell marked "for enemies." The fact that it led to Harry's missing a Quidditch game is wholly irrelevant.) IOW, JKR isn't telling the reader what to think, but I suspect that she intended for most readers to be shocked by Harry's successful Crucio, which goes against everything we've seen in the books so far. (I was shocked. The young readers of my acquaintance were shocked. I suspect that most movie goers who haven't read the books--sorry, List Elves!--will be shocked if that Crucio appears onscreen, especially if Harry's face shows the sadism--enjoyment of inflicting pain--necessary for casting that spell.

Magpie:
> There's a difference between Crouch's crucios and Harry's. 

Carol:
Is there? I'm not so sure. (In any case, Barty Sr. only authorized Crucios; he never uses any Unforgiveable except an Imperius himself.) The Crucios cast by Voldemort, Bellatrix, Krum under Crouch Jr.'s Imperius Curse, Crouch Jr. himself on a spider (whose suffering he was enjoying, to Neville's distress), Amycus, Crabbe-n-Goyle, and Draco (half-hating, half-enjoying what he was doing or he could never have succeeded) are all depicted as terrible. We know what the victims are feeling because the agony has been described by the narrator from Harry's point of view. We've seen the other victims shriek and howl and writhe in agony--exactly as Amycus does. There's no difference--except in the reaction of the good characters.

Again, what are we to make of it? Harry acting like a Death Eater and the deluded McGonagall approving? Are we also supposed to approve because Harry is, after all, Harry, the Chosen One? Are we supposed to make excuses for him (he was under a lot of stress and Amycus deserved it)? Clearly, he *didn't* use restraint. He *meant* that Curse. He *intended* to inflict the same agony that he, himself, had felt and had not forgotten. Only the Amycus's striking the bookcase and being knocked out cold stopped him.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't approve. I understand his behavior, but I can't excuse it. And "Harry is not a saint" is not sufficient explanation. 

I think that JKR deliberately refrains from having Harry rethink or actively regret that Crucio, in part because, at that point in the story, Harry is still bent on revenge against Snape and still thinks he has to kill Voldemort. Possibly--and I'm only thinking with my keyboard here (speculating, IOW)--he's unconsciously preparing himself to cast an AK, the last and worst of the Unforgiveables and the only way he knows of to kill Voldemort--by casting the other two. He does not yet realize that he has to sacrifice himself, not fight, much less that a second confrontation (in which he can also choose not to kill) will follow the first.

And here's another thought. We don't know exactly what's going on in Harry's unconscious mind after his visit to the Pensieve (his conscious mind is preoccupied with his upcoming self-sacrifice and Dumbledore's betrayal"), but one thought is extremely revealing. It's clear that he now identifies not only with the previously hated Severus Snape but with Voldemort himself to the degree that he thinks of them together as "the abandoned boys" whose only home was Hogwarts. And later, Harry publicly vindicates Snape and offers Voldemort a chance for redemption. After King's Cross, he also forgives the flawed and manipulative Dumbledore for a variety of failings, most notably withholding the information that he would have to sacrifice himself.

Could Harry have understood and forgiven Snape and Dumbledore and resisted the temptation to kill Voldemort had he not also been a flawed human being? And would the schoolboy flaws of breaking rules, lying to friends and teachers alike, and cheating on homework have been sufficient? Or did he need to feel hatred and the desire for revenge, even yielding to the temptation to torture another human being (however despicable) before he could understand and forgive the even more serious failings of others?

I don't know what JKR intended us to feel. I don't really care, considering how different my views are from hers in such matters as Marietta's "spots" and Fred and George's antics. All I know is that, for me, this interpretation works. It's hard, perhaps impossible, to forgive those who've trespassed against us if we haven't trespassed ourselves, even if not to the same degree.

And, much as I hate the Crucio scene (especially McGonagall's reaction), I'm glad that for once Harry is clearly doing the wrong thing (beyond taking credit for potions improvements that aren't his own or telling a lie) rather than, say, being deluded by Voldemort into going to the MoM or using a Dark spell because he doesn't know what it does. All too often, Harry's failings are either trivial or the result of a mistake or (in the case of Quidditch) someone else's fault. Here, in this instance, no one is to blame except Harry. He is, IMO, clearly in the wrong, regardless of his own lack of remorse and McGonagall's reaction. He has yielded, like Snape and Dumbledore and Voldemort before him, to the temptation to do evil, and, having done so, he can now understand both himself and them, and, once he knows that he must sacrifice himself rather than fight, give up the desire for revenge that has consumed him (and manifests itself in that Crucio). And having done that, he can also forgive.

Carol, who was also going to discuss the last two books as revealing the humanity of Death Eaters and the flaws of good characters but didn't have room in this post




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 18:45:23 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 18:45:23 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtuvif+aee8@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtva83+kgke@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186484

sartoris22 wrote:
> 
> <snip> I think that,like Harry, we're supposed to change our view of Snape, although I'm sure that there are some readers who liked Snape before HBP or DH. 

Carol responds:
Yep, one or two of us liked Snape earlier! :-) Seriously, a lot of readers were sure that Snape was Dumbledore's man (viewed at that time as a good thing, however we may feel about DD now) and many (I wasn't among them, but never mind) believed that he was in love with Lily, as the whole LOLLIPOPS theory testifies.

But even those readers wanted to know Snape's complete motivation. The rest needed to see him clearly and see him whole (to borrow Browning's words about Shelley). Snape himself doesn't change, or, rather, he has evolved as a character before the HP books began--gifted but poor and neglected little boy with a crush on a Muggle-born to the HBP to a young man can't resist the lure of his joining his "precious little Death Eater friends" to a real Death Eater who spies on Dumbledore and reports what he heard of the Prophecy to Voldemort to a desperate young man torn by remorse and willing to do "anything" to save Lily Potter (and, later, to do anything to protect her son so she won't have died in vain) to Dumbledore's man/Hogwarts professor/headmaster, the Snape we see partly revealed in the books, usually presented from Harry's point of view but sometimes from the outside, simultaneously objectively and ambiguously, as in "Spinner's End" and "The Dark Lord Rising." Snape does evolve in that he begins to save lives not directly connected with Harry's as part of his fight against Voldemort, but it isn't his growth as a character but Harry's (and the reader's) perception of him that's important. If it weren't for shared speculations among readers as we waited for new books to come out, perhaps we'd have been as surprised as Harry (for whom Snape is a murderer and against whom he wants to take revenge) by "The Prince's Tale." It works best, I think, readers who read the whole series in sequence without discussing the books with others. But even for us, is he or isn't he evil was a big question. Borders Books centered their whole advertising campaign around it.

"The Prince's Tale" reveals the flawed human being that is Severus Snape--his mistakes, his wrong choices, his remorse, his attempts at restitution, his true motivations. Much of it is for the reader's benefit, but it's also for Harry's. He emerges from that venture into the Pensieve not only knowing what he has to do and willing to do it (as he probably would not have been had he seen only the "pig to the slaughter" memory, but with a clear perception both of Snape and of his own mission (symbolized, IMO, by the absence of glasses in "King's Cross), and ready for the next step of forgiving his "betrayer," Dumbledore.

But, yes. I agree that, like Harry, the reader who has accepted Harry's view of Snape as accurate is supposed to understand Snape and forgive him. "The Prince's Tale" is supposed to be a revelation for the reader as well as for Harry, at least for readers who have overlooked the limitations of Harry's pov and devices like the unreliable narrator. (How well it worked depends, of course, on the individual reader.)

sartoris22 wrote: 
> We find out in OOTP that James and Sirius picked on Snape. This fact, at least momentarily, changes Harry's view about James. We discover in DH that Snape loved Lily, but his insecurity about being part Muggle, a trait he shares with Voldemort, compels him to hate Muggles, although he is in love with a Muggle, The fact is that Snape, in his own way, is capable of love, a somewhat romantic love. Then we find out that Snape is risking his life as a tribute to that love, which Dumbledore uses to convince Snape to be a spy. In DH, Dumbledore suggests that Snape is warming to Harry, and Snape responds by producing the patronous of the Lily's doe and saying "Always." Snape still loves LIly and doesn't like Harry, but it is curious that at the end of his life, Snape wants Harry to know this loving and courageous aspect of his personality, to reveal, as Dumbledore advices, the better part of himself. By the end of the book, Snape is revealed to be an even more complex character, and our feelings toward him are, in my opinion, supposed to change for the better.

Carol responds:
Just one minor point: Lily is not a Muggle but a Muggle-born, and even at age nine or ten Severus distinguishes between the two, holding the Muggle Petunia in contempt because she can't perform magic and won't be allowed to attend Hogwarts but liking, admiring, and even loving Lily, who is clearly a gifted little witch with whom he is proud and happy to share his superior knowledge of the WW. I doubt that a "blood traitor" mother who married a Muggle would have taught him to hate Muggle-borns or hold them in contempt. It appears to be only Muggles that he hates and resents, probably because of his Muggle father. (I've presented my views on this point in detail elsewhere and won't repeat them here.)

Aside from that (IMO) important distinction, I agree with this paragraph. We *are* supposed to think better of Snape, just as Harry does. We're supposed to approve of his public vindication of Snape and of his naming his second son after the two wizards without whom he could not have defeated Voldemort, Dumbledore and Snape. Obviously, not all readers can reach Harry's level of forgiveness, but I think that, at the end, JKR's and Harry's and the narrator's views all come together at last. Harry chooses to honor those two characters, one for his wisdom and the other for his courage. And that is how JKR, with her "all was well" ending, thinks that it ought to be.

Carol, who thinks that the mere fact that we're still discussing Snape testifies to his complexity 





From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Thu May  7 20:47:21 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 20:47:21 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtv6m3+iiba@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtvhcp+fe39@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186485

> Magpie wrote:
> > <snip> There's plenty of things that happen in the books that I think come across as clearly bad without anybody having to point them out. In this case, it's not like I don't think Harry's supposed to having a lapse here. I just think it's the kind of lapse that jkoney describes--a lapse that's not a big deal at all, that's realistic for people in this situation. In fact s/he used the same defense for it, again using the word saint. The difference isn't between thinking Crucio is good or bad--everyone agrees that it's bad. The difference is between whether this is bad in the sense of Crouch using Crucios or bad in the sense of Harry blowing up Aunt Marge or MWPP becoming animagi. I think it's more the latter than the former.
> 
> Carol responds:
> The question of authorial intentions is always tricky, especially since such intentions aren't always expressed or even conscious. All we have to go on here is JKR's remark that Harry has never been a saint, which certainly does come through clearly at this moment. (He may be a Christ figure, to revert to that topic for a moment, but he is assuredly not Christ.)

Magpie:
True--and I don't really mean to put so much weight on it. It's really more just that I feel like her answer in the interview mirrors what I read in the scene in terms of tone. So it seems relevent to the idea that the point of the scene is to ask this question. I don't think JKR takes torture lightly in the real world--she worked for Amnesty. 

Cutting a large chunk here that I agree with.

> Magpie:
> > There's a difference between Crouch's crucios and Harry's. 
> 
> Carol:
> Is there? I'm not so sure. (In any case, Barty Sr. only authorized Crucios; he never uses any Unforgiveable except an Imperius himself.) The Crucios cast by Voldemort, Bellatrix, Krum under Crouch Jr.'s Imperius Curse, Crouch Jr. himself on a spider (whose suffering he was enjoying, to Neville's distress), Amycus, Crabbe-n-Goyle, and Draco (half-hating, half-enjoying what he was doing or he could never have succeeded) are all depicted as terrible. We know what the victims are feeling because the agony has been described by the narrator from Harry's point of view. We've seen the other victims shriek and howl and writhe in agony--exactly as Amycus does. There's no difference--except in the reaction of the good characters.
> 
> Again, what are we to make of it? Harry acting like a Death Eater and the deluded McGonagall approving? Are we also supposed to approve because Harry is, after all, Harry, the Chosen One? Are we supposed to make excuses for him (he was under a lot of stress and Amycus deserved it)? Clearly, he *didn't* use restraint. He *meant* that Curse. He *intended* to inflict the same agony that he, himself, had felt and had not forgotten. Only the Amycus's striking the bookcase and being knocked out cold stopped him.
> I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't approve. I understand his behavior, but I can't excuse it. And "Harry is not a saint" is not sufficient explanation. 

Magpie:
True, but I can't say that a reader who does make excuses for him or feels like this is more just showing that war is hell and he's not perfect is wrong, because that's what it feels like I'm being told in the book. Sure it's wrong, but not wrong in a way many people wouldn't find all that wrong.

Carol: 
> I think that JKR deliberately refrains from having Harry rethink or actively regret that Crucio, in part because, at that point in the story, Harry is still bent on revenge against Snape and still thinks he has to kill Voldemort. Possibly--and I'm only thinking with my keyboard here (speculating, IOW)--he's unconsciously preparing himself to cast an AK, the last and worst of the Unforgiveables and the only way he knows of to kill Voldemort--by casting the other two. He does not yet realize that he has to sacrifice himself, not fight, much less that a second confrontation (in which he can also choose not to kill) will follow the first.

Magpie:
I think that doesn't ever occur to me because Harry rarely rethinks or actively regrets anything. I don't even think he rethinks anything about Snape, he just take the information that Snape was on his side (ha ha, Voldemort!) and switches him into the "good ally" category without having to rethink or regret anything. Sometimes readers even remember regret for Harry that he didn't really have. 

Since DH pretty much drops Harry's hatred of Snape I didn't feel him let go of it before letting Voldemort off. The most important information he gets from the Pensieve is that Snape loved his mother and was a good guy, which I think is the main reason to forgive him. (Plus he's just had his long talk with Dumbledore who assured him of his love and also put his mind in the right place.) His offer of mercy to Voldemort does actually sound like something Harry would have done anyway. That's the type of situation where Harry would have a sense of fair play about it (of course there's no danger of Voldemort actually feeling remorse). 

I guess I just get the opposite impression from reading the story, that Harry certainly can forgive those who've trespassed against him if he hasn't trespassed (so badly) himself. In fact, that's one of the main feelings I got from DH and from the series, that Harry was very much doing that. 

There are many times in canon I've heard readers think Harry was completely in the wrong without Harry himself thinking that, or any of his allies thinking that. If he never even has to know that he was wrong, I don't know how much credit I can give him for learning from it. At other times when people are wrong I get much more of a sense that they're made to know it.

-m




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 23:07:49 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 23:07:49 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 13-14
Message-ID: <gtvpk5+q8cl@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186486


In CH 13 Mrs. Cattermole is one of the muggle-borns and as we know she is the wife of reg whom Hermione made sick and Ron impersonated him.

Is JKR saying here that as long as they tried to save the life of his wife, what was done to him is the means justifies the ends?

Is the fact that they tried to save his wife means that they were wrong, but now they are back to themselves?

What does it mean to you if it does not mean anything of the above?

"Umbridge held out a small hand: she looked so toad-like at that moment that Harry was quite surprised not to see webs between the stubby fingers" - p.215

Alla:

Oh Dolores, one sentence and I am already feeling disgusted with you. Boy I missed you sooo... NOT.


"Harry could still see the blond-haired youth's face, it was merry, wild; there was a Fred and George-ish air of triumphant trickery about him" - p.233

Alla:

Now, knowing that this youth is Grindelwald, it seems to me that by comparing his air of trickery with Fred and George's air of trickery, I think this is one of those moments when JKR is saying that their pranks are not always necessarily good things?

Again, maybe I am giving her too much credit or maybe not?

On the other hand, maybe it is the contrary thing, maybe the fact that young Grindelwald is portrayed as merry faced, maybe it shows that he is different from Tom dear? Maybe the fact that he is able to show the humor, to have fun, maybe that sort of foreshadows that he is able to feel remorse as well when he is old and in prizon? Am I making sense here?






From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 23:09:29 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 23:09:29 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gttf5v+rq7p@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtvpn9+glvc@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186487

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "sistermagpie" <sistermagpie at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> jkoney:
> It seems like you are taking it out of context and expanding on it.
> 
> Harry's day started with the break in at Gringotts and ended with him finding his friends in the ROR where they are still showing signs of having been tortured. He's also under a time constraint because he needs to find the horcrux as soon as possible because Voldemort has just been told that Harry is at the castle. Standing in front of him is the person who tortured his friends and who is now spitting in the face of McGonagall. Harry then takes of the cloak and tells Carrow that he shouldn't have done that. Carrow turns and Harry curses
> him.
> 
> Harry hit him with the curse and stopped. There was no excess time, no targeting his testicles, eyes, etc. It was if Harry had TASERed him. People don't consider a TASER a form of torture, unless someone does it repeatedly for a long time.
> That didn't happen here.
> 
> Magpie:
> I don't think I'm taking anything out of context or exaggerating it. First, Harry's bad day has little to do with the definition of Crucio. I know he's in a bad mood, I know he's emotional, and I know he's angry when Carrow spits on McGonagall.

jkoney:
He's angry (highly stressed and under the gun because he knows Voldemort is looking for the horcruxes and he has been told Harry is at Hogwarts) well before Amycus spits on McGonagall. That is all part of the context, not just the spitting.

 Magpie:
> Harry uses the curse named for the Latin word for torture. A curse that we've seen numerous times in canon, and never for more than a few seconds. But only in this instance is it suddenly not torture because it didn't last a long time. 
> 
> The point of the testicle comment was that it was designed for maximum suffering even in small bursts. Torture is used to cause pain. Harry's experience of Crucio shows us that this is torture--far worse than the testicle electrode, actually. Agonizing pain you think you're going to die from. A spell about wanting to cause pain, that's named after the word for that concept. Why would I dial it down to taser for Harry?

jkoney:
The simplest definition of torture I found was 
1) Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion. 2)Excruciating physical or mental pain; 

Both of those, I believe, back up your argument that what Harry did was torture. 

I have a problem defining severe or excrutiating pain. Is one second long enough? Does it have to be at least ten seconds? What about the effect on different people? Suppose I can handle more pain than someone else, if the same curse is applied to both of us it torture in both uses?

When Snape blasted Lockhart in the dueling club was that enough to be considered torture? Lockhart didn't look to good afterwards, whereas if it had happened to Snape I think he would have handled it much better.

If Harry had walked over and kicked Amycus in the testicles would that be considered torture? I know for a fact that it is severe pain when it occurs, your breathing stops, your kidneys feel like they are exploding, your eyes feel like they are going to pop out...

It seems to me that torture is one of those things that you know it when you see it. And while we may both agree on many things being torture, I don't think that it's torture in this situation. But that is just my opinion.







From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 23:21:06 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 23:21:06 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtu2r3+10u5b@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtvqd2+5m1m@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186488

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "montavilla47"  
> > > 
> > 
> > jkoney:
> > The definition I found for grudge is "a deep seated feeling of resentment or rancor."
> > 
> > After a decade of James being dead any thoughts of James should have been put to rest. But they aren't they are transferred to Harry. While we talked about the celebrity comment there was still no need for it other than to take a cheap shot at a Potter. 
> > 
> > This and his other thoughts/actions show that the grudge is still there able to be brought to the forefront of his mind when the need arises.
> 
> Montavilla47:
> 
> Well, yeah.  But that's normal human behavior.  If, for 
> example, you had a sweetheart in high school, who married
> the quarterback of the football team and then one day, he 
> had too much to drink and drove their car into a tree, you 
> might have some resentments towards him, too.

jkoney:
After a decade, I would call that resentment "deep seated" and therefore I would consider it a grudge.

> > jkoney:
> > No one is arguing that it is a huge thing just that it still exists. He did have other things on his mind at the end of HBP, but the comment he makes is about James. If the resentment wasn't there, then the comment wouldn't have been made.
> 
> Montavilla47:
> If you agree that Snape's grudge against James isn't a huge
> thing, then we are in agreement.  
> 
> > > Montavilla47:
> > > I don't know.  Sirius managed a good grudge against
> > > Peter that lasted at least twelves years and nearly 
> > > caused him to murder the rat.  
> > > 
> > >
> > jkoney:
> > Well someone turning over my best friends to be killed seems like a good reason to me to hold a grudge.
> 
> Montavilla47:
> 
> Sirius believes that Peter turned over his best friends
> to Voldemort.  Which, you seem to be saying, makes a 
> grudge against Peter reasonable.
> 
> In the Shrieking Shack, Snape believes that Sirius
> turned his best friend over to Voldemort.  So, then,
> shouldn't Snape's grudge be just as reasonable?

jkoney:
The difference is that Sirius "knew" for sure that Peter turned his friends over to Voldemort. Snape could only believe second hand reports (like everyone else). Although, Snape had enough connections with the DE's to find out that it was Peter.





From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 23:27:00 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 23:27:00 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtup4q+s99m@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtvqo4+llae@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186489

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
> Pippin:
> As the someone in question, I want to make it clear that I didn't mean Snape's whole life was a waste, just that the waste was life long. And I also don't think the grudge was just about the prank, or James's schoolboy arrogance. 
> 
> It was about  James's arrogance in refusing to believe that someone close to him had turned traitor and was keeping the Dark Lord informed of his and Lily's movements. 
> 
>
jkoney:
I thought they just knew that the spy was someone in the Order not that it was one of James' close friends.

Also, by this time wasn't Snape already working as a spy for Dumbledore? If so, maybe Snape was mad at himself for not knowing who it was. He was an inner circle DE. And it would be much easier to blame James for picking someone than to blame himself for not knowing who the spy was.




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 23:30:55 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 23:30:55 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtvqd2+5m1m@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtvqvf+mrka@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186490

> > Montavilla47:
> > 
> > Sirius believes that Peter turned over his best friends
> > to Voldemort.  Which, you seem to be saying, makes a 
> > grudge against Peter reasonable.
> > 
> > In the Shrieking Shack, Snape believes that Sirius
> > turned his best friend over to Voldemort.  So, then,
> > shouldn't Snape's grudge be just as reasonable?
> 
> jkoney:
> The difference is that Sirius "knew" for sure that Peter turned his friends over to Voldemort. Snape could only believe second hand reports (like everyone else). Although, Snape had enough connections with the DE's to find out that it was Peter.

Alla:

LOL, Sirius is my second favorite character in the books and I was extremely happy when Snape died and more than satisfied the way JKR chose for him to die, that just to give you a brief idea how I feel about Snape, in case you did not figure it out yet ;). But I really do not see much difference here, you know?

I will never forgive Snape for not listening to Sirius begging and being ready to feed Sirius to dementors. That to me goes beyond holding grudges and beyond anything.

But are you saying that Snape should not have believed second hand reports? Are you saying that Snape should have done some investigating or something?

Why? Did he own Sirius something at that point? Now, Dumbledore I want to kick every time I think what he did for one of his soldiers (nothing).

JMO,

Alla





From sartoris22 at yahoo.com  Thu May  7 23:33:06 2009
From: sartoris22 at yahoo.com (sartoris22)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 23:33:06 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtva83+kgke@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtvr3i+7li4@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186491

Carol responds:
Just one minor point: Lily is not a Muggle but a Muggle-born, and even at age nine or ten Severus distinguishes between the two, holding the Muggle Petunia in contempt because she can't perform magic and won't be allowed to attend Hogwarts but liking, admiring, and even loving Lily, who is clearly a gifted little witch with whom he is proud and happy to share his superior knowledge of the WW. I doubt that a "blood traitor" mother who married a Muggle would have taught him to hate Muggle-borns or hold them in contempt. It appears to be only Muggles that he hates and resents, probably because of his Muggle father. (I've presented my views on this point in detail elsewhere and won't repeat them here.)


sartoris22:

Thank you for the clarification. It makes me reconsider the whole Muggle thing, which is really somewhat confusing. Voldemort hates Muggles but is half Muggle. In DH, he wants to round up all the Muggle born wixards and witches, but are those people really Muggles? If, as you say, Lily is not a Muggle because she has magical powers, then what does it really matter if a magical person has one or two non-magical parents? Why is Harry not a Mudblood but Hermione is? Apparently, Voldemort is okay with half bloods, but that doesn't really make sense to me. If a Mudblood has dirty blood, then why isn't a half blood equally reviled? Sirius says that his parents had "pureblood mania." Shouldn't anyone with Muggle blood be considered undesireable? And why would the Deatheaters follow a half blood like Voldemort? Even if Voldemort killed all the so called Mudbloods, as long as he allowed half bloods to live and breed, the wizard blood would continue to be tainted. For example, Ginny is a pureblood who marries and has children with Harry, who is a half blood. Would his kids blood be tainted, or because Harry is magical, would his kids be considered pure bloods?





From horridporrid03 at yahoo.com  Fri May  8 02:18:00 2009
From: horridporrid03 at yahoo.com (horridporrid03)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 02:18:00 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gtu2r3+10u5b@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu04oo+7q88@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186492

> >>Montavilla47:
> <snip>
> And even I'm not going to force anyone to re-examine the books
> in light of Snape's memories.  After all, do people need to 
> go back and re-think Croody bouncing Draco off the stone floor
> in GoF once they realize that he's someone different than they 
> thought he was the first time they read that chapter?  No, of 
> course not.  
> 
> I consider it more fun to go back and consider different 
> motivations and perspectives.  But you're not *obligated*
> to do it, just because I like it.
> <snip>

Betsy Hp:
Honestly, that the books don't obligate readers to go back and re-examine things like that is a reason I'm so squirmy about them.  Morally, I mean.  I don't think she does it on purpose, but JKR has a terrorist she identifies as particularly sadistic (he was at least a witness to, and possibly a participant in the torture that broke Neville's parents' minds) torture two school-boys (physically Draco, emotionally Neville).  Not only is that fact never driven home (Harry never has a squirmy moment of realizing he enjoyed watching a Death Eater mistreat a classmate, nor does he rethink what happened to Neville), in a later book one of the Gryffindor's praises the Death Eater as being a good teacher.  To Umbridge, iirc. 

Again, I think this is merely sloppiness on JKR's part.  But it's a big reason I don't recommend the series as good reading.

Betsy Hp




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Fri May  8 03:14:34 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 03:14:34 -0000
Subject: Purebloods, Half-bloods, and Muggle-borns
In-Reply-To: <gtvr3i+7li4@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu082q+90l8@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186493

Carol earlier:
> Just one minor point: Lily is not a Muggle but a Muggle-born, and even at age nine or ten Severus distinguishes between the two, holding the Muggle Petunia in contempt because she can't perform magic and won't be allowed to attend Hogwarts but liking, admiring, and even loving Lily, who is clearly a gifted little witch with whom he is proud and happy to share his superior knowledge of the WW. <snip>
> 
> 
sartoris22 responded:
> 
> Thank you for the clarification. It makes me reconsider the whole Muggle thing, which is really somewhat confusing. Voldemort hates Muggles but is half Muggle. In DH, he wants to round up all the Muggle born wixards and witches, but are those people really Muggles? If, as you say, Lily is not a Muggle because she has magical powers, then what does it really matter if a magical person has one or two non-magical parents? Why is Harry not a Mudblood but Hermione is? Apparently, Voldemort is okay with half bloods, but that doesn't really make sense to me. If a Mudblood has dirty blood, then why isn't a half blood equally reviled? Sirius says that his parents had "pureblood mania." Shouldn't anyone with Muggle blood be considered undesireable? And why would the Deatheaters follow a half blood like Voldemort? Even if Voldemort killed all the so called Mudbloods, as long as he allowed half bloods to live and breed, the wizard blood would continue to be tainted. For example, Ginny is a pureblood who marries and has children with Harry, who is a half blood. Would his kids blood be tainted, or because Harry is magical, would his kids be considered pure bloods?

Carol again:
It's been awhile since this topic, but you should be able to do a search (if the search engine is cooperating!) and find quite a number of helpful old posts.

I agree with you that it's odd that the pure-blood supremacist followers of Voldemort should willingly follow a Half-blood, and I thought that it was even odder for him to hold a meeting in the graveyard where his Muggle father was buried. (Maybe that's not as big a giveaway as I once thought considering that both Muggles and Wizards are buried at Godric's Hollow.) At any rate, at least one Death Eater, Bellatrix Lestrange (who wasn't at the graveyard), is unaware of Voldemort's origins and considers it blasphemy when Harry calls Voldemort a Half-Blood in OoP. Bellatrix also seems to consider herself better than Snape, commenting with sneering arrogance that she and Narcissa (both Pure-bloods) are probably the first of their kind to enter the "Muggle dungheap" where Snape lives. (Obviously, she can't mean the first witch or wizard since Snape lives there.)

There seems to be some degree of prejudice against Half-Bloods, then, especially in Slytherin, but it's nothing like the virulent prejudice of some Slytherins against Muggle-borns, Witches and Wizards who have no magical blood at all because both their parents are Muggles (defined repeatedly in the books as "nonmagical people"). As Ron points out, many of the Death Eaters are Half-Bloods because there simply aren't enough Pure-Bloods left.

It seems to me that the half-blood concept (which is an actual legal concept relating to people who are related to another person through only one rather than two common ancestors, the simplest example being a half-brother or sister. Hagrid's half-brother, Grawp, is still, in Hagrid's mind, his brother because they share a mother. (He says something about blood being important in that sense, just as he speaks of the Malfoys as coming from "bad blood.") Evidently, a Half-Blood Witch or Wizard is still "one of us" even though the magical blood comes from only one side, just as a half-brother or half-sister is still a relative even though the shared "blood" comes only from one parent.

I haven't checked JKR's website for a long time, but she used to have a detailed explanation relating the prejudice of Pure-blood supremacists like the Malfoys against Muggle-borns ("the other kind," as eleven-year-old Draco calls them) to prejudice against Jews in Nazi Germany, something to do with the number of Muggle grandparents a person has (both Harry and Snape have two compared with none for Ron and four for Hermione, making Harry a Half-Blood like Snape even though his mother was a Muggle-born witch rather than a Muggle).

Side note: The whole concept of Muggle blood as "dirty" is almost silly considering that it's based on the *absence* of a trait (magical "blood"). Slughorn's reference to Harry's "genes" aside, the WW isn't looking at the question scientifically. It's more like, well, dog or horse breeding in the days before genetics, or the old concept of the blood royal (if you couldn't trace your ancestry to, say, William I, you weren't a suitable consort).

I doubt that I've fully answered your questions, but I hope I've helped a little.

Carol, hoping that others will join in the discussion and maybe link us to some of their own old posts





From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Fri May  8 03:39:08 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 03:39:08 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gtvpn9+glvc@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu09gs+4q12@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186494

> > Magpie:
> > I don't think I'm taking anything out of context or exaggerating it. First, Harry's bad day has little to do with the definition of Crucio. I know he's in a bad mood, I know he's emotional, and I know he's angry when Carrow spits on McGonagall.


> 
> jkoney:
> He's angry (highly stressed and under the gun because he knows Voldemort is looking for the horcruxes and he has been told Harry is at Hogwarts) well before Amycus spits on McGonagall. That is all part of the context, not just the spitting.

> Magpie:
I know that. But I didn't deny any of that. They're all reasons why Harry reaches for his wand and hits the Crucio button.

>  Magpie:
> > Harry uses the curse named for the Latin word for torture. A curse that we've seen numerous times in canon, and never for more than a few seconds. But only in this instance is it suddenly not torture because it didn't last a long time. 

> jkoney:
> The simplest definition of torture I found was 
> 1) Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion. 2)Excruciating physical or mental pain; 
> 
> Both of those, I believe, back up your argument that what Harry did was torture. 
> 
> I have a problem defining severe or excrutiating pain. Is one second long enough? Does it have to be at least ten seconds? What about the effect on different people? Suppose I can handle more pain than someone else, if the same curse is applied to both of us it torture in both uses?
> 
> When Snape blasted Lockhart in the dueling club was that enough to be considered torture? Lockhart didn't look to good afterwards, whereas if it had happened to Snape I think he would have handled it much better.

Magpie:
I think this canon makes it far easier. It has a spell that's all about causing severe and excruciating pain--even from the same root as excruciating. We're in Harry's pov to feel what it feels like--like severe and excruciating pain. 

Jkoney:
> It seems to me that torture is one of those things that you know it when you see it. And while we may both agree on many things being torture, I don't think that it's torture in this situation. But that is just my opinion.

Magpie:
I actually do think your way of reading the scene makes sense. I may disagree with you on whether Crucio can ever not be torture since it seems to me it's by definition torture in its purest sense, but I do think your reading fits the scene. That's why I disagree with the idea that the author wrote the scene with my reaction in mind. I think if Harry's doing wrong in this scene it's the kind of wrong you're describing. One that's more about a good guy under the stress caused by evil people.

-m




From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Fri May  8 05:36:58 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 05:36:58 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 13-14
In-Reply-To: <gtvpk5+q8cl@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu0gdq+8g6r@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186495

> Alla:
> Is JKR saying here that as long as they tried to save the life of his wife, what was done to him is the means justifies the ends?

Zara:
No, though I do think Cattermole would in the end be grateful. He would probably have been less effective in securing her release. I don't think that would make sense anyway, as her rescue was an unplanned diversion from the primary mission of the Trio.

> Alla:
> Is the fact that they tried to save his wife means that they were wrong, but now they are back to themselves?

Zara:
They were themselves all along. They did not poison Mr. Cattermole with a Puking Pastille in some sort of moment of personality derangement. It was a part of a plan they had worked out in cold blood over the course of weeks.

> Alla:
> What does it mean to you if it does not mean anything of the above?

Zara:
The chapter showed us what Harry and Co. were fighting, in all its gory details. The personal corruption in the new Ministry (worsened, I would say, when Umbridge has her eye, and people threaten relatives of coworkers to obtain services, or turn each other in in hopes of getting their jobs). And of course, the very worst, the treatment of Muggle-born witches and wizards under the new regime. So I think it showed, starkly, what was the underlying motivation of the Trio in this book. (Because it was their disgust and disapproval of what they saw, that motivated them to rescue Mrs. Cattermole and the others).

> "Harry could still see the blond-haired youth's face, it was merry, wild; there was a Fred and George-ish air of triumphant trickery about him" - p.233
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Now, knowing that this youth is Grindelwald, it seems to me that by comparing his air of trickery with Fred and George's air of trickery, I think this is one of those moments when JKR is saying that their pranks are not always necessarily good things?

Zara:
Oh, I would like that! I doubt it, though. 

> Alla: 
> On the other hand, maybe it is the contrary thing, maybe the fact that young Grindelwald is portrayed as merry faced, maybe it shows that he is different from Tom dear? Maybe the fact that he is able to show the humor, to have fun, maybe that sort of foreshadows that he is able to feel remorse as well when he is old and in prizon? Am I making sense here?

Zara:
Sure, but I would propose another purpose this serves. We learn Albus was somewhat Hermione-like as a boy, only even more brilliant. He bestows his knowledge on classmates, and is loved not only by his teachers,  but the leading intellects of his day, with whom he already corresponds on matters of magical interest.

So perhaps this shows us somewhat, what it was that Albus saw in Gellert in the first place, aside from brains and blond good looks. Albus sounds like someone who could have used a more fun-loving partner, a Ron to Albus's Hermione.




From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Fri May  8 06:13:53 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 06:13:53 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtuu71+780k@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu0ij1+iq5h@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186496

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
>
> Montavilla47:
> 
> Well, yeah. But that's normal human behavior. If, for
> example, you had a sweetheart in high school, who married
> the quarterback of the football team and then one day, he
> had too much to drink and drove their car into a tree, you
> might have some resentments towards him, too.
> 
> Even if you served him the drinks.
> 
> Nobody would get over that kind of thing easily.
> But I'll bet you'd be angrier over him driving drunk and
> killing your old sweetheart than you would because he
> used to give you wedgies.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Well, that is if the other reasons for that grudge are dismissed of course, but to me this sounds more like as if your friend, who you would love to be your sweetheart married the quarterback of the football team and you told the gang leader that they did something to try and stop his activities and that gang leader (whose gang you were a member of) decided he is going to come and kill them one day. You warned them that they should go to witness protection program, but the guy refused.
> 
> Yeah, I could be angry, but that does not mean that I would not know that I should be angry with myself first and foremost.


Montavilla47:

Hehe.  But it would be *more* like you told your gang leader 
about this liquor store they should hold up, and the quarterback
happened to witness the crime ad *then* had to go into the 
witness protection program.  

:)

Now I can't even remember why I brought that silly
comparison in in the first place.

> Montavilla47:
> I consider it more fun to go back and consider different
> motivations and perspectives. But you're not *obligated*
> to do it, just because I like it.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> It sounds as if this is some sort of complicated task to do. Everybody who rereads the series after DH reads it with new information in mind, no?. The question is whether this information indeed changes the character significantly or at least somewhat. It is not like we  will ever forget that Snape loved Lily and worked for Dumbledore. I mean as you said we debated the topic whether he works for Dumbledore for two years and it is not like even I who really really really wanted him to work for Vodlemort was surprised by this storyline. We figured it out, right?


Montavilla47:
Yes.  But that's because we lived through the period when the 
books came out--and there was a two- or three-year wait
in between each one.  That gave us all a lot of time to 
speculate on what was really going on.  And if the books had
contained an ESE Minerva McGonagall, most of the fan world
would have been extremely shocked, but that was a possibility
that was thoroughly explored on this list.  

So, none of were really in a position to have our minds 
blown by a reversal on Snape from evil murderer to flawed
but basically heroic good guy.


Alla:
 And it was always in my mind as possibility which I hoped will not come true. 

Montavilla47:
I hear you.  I was hoping that Harry wouldn't turn into Christ.  
We all have our disappointments.

Alla:
So it did. But the thing is, it depends on what to you is the core of Snape's character. If you think that he is good because he works for Dumbledore,  then of course his character changed after Prince tale. Or did he? Because for those who thought he was good, they already thought so, right?

Montavilla47:
My perception of Snape as good was pretty dependent on him 
working for Dumbledore.  If it had turned out that he hadn't been
told to kill Dumbledore by Dumbledore, then I think I would have 
had to accept that Snape was a force for bad in the books.


Alla:
> But to me, even if I wanted that plot development badly, him working for Voldemort  would have been the icing on the cake.  Before book 7 I saw Snape as nasty man who was capable of hating innocent child on sight because of the history he had with his parents. Said nasty man may have been DE or working for Dumbledore. Nothing in book 7 changed my view of Snape,  as nasty man who was capable of hating innocent child on sight because of the history he had with his parents. Text to me did not disprove it, in fact text provided additional clues to strengthen that interpretation (his indifference to Harry's fate, his indignation ? For him?). I learned that he worked for Dumbledore, but to me the core of his character remained mostly the same.

Montavilla47:
It sounds like that was a deal-breaker for you.  It wasn't
ever a deal-breaker for me.  But then, it wasn't something
that struck me as particularly brutal.  That's just me.

You know, I do feel sympathy for your POV.  I'm the 
same way with Darth Vader.  The man blew up Naboo, for
goodness sake.  

When he told Luke that he was his father, that seemed
important to me because it affected Luke--but it didn't 
change my opinion of Vader one little bit.  And when
Luke went to go save him, I just shook my head.  Could 
not have cared less that Anakin got redeemed.

Twenty years later, I went to see the new SW films--
and got all the backstory on Anakin/Vader.  Still don't
care about him.

All I really learned was that, in addition to every other
horrible thing he does, he blew up Jimmy Smits.  I'll never
forgive him for that. (Although, I suppose he ought to 
get a little credit for blowing up Jar-Jar Binks.)


On a slightly different note, the Prince's Tale didn't
change my view of Snape significantly, but it really changed 
my view on James, Lily, and Dumbledore.  Before reading 
that chapter, I might not have liked James, but I was a 
bit fond of Lily for jumping in save the geeky boy being
bullied.

But the whole SWM episode completely changed.  She
did jump in to help her friend, but at the same time 
hid the fact that they were friends.  Which is unfathomable
behavior to me.  

And I had assumed, as did most people, that James had
sobered up after saving Snape (this, even after Lupin told 
us differently).  That he behaved so atrociously after his
friends nearly killed Snape pushes him into some kind 
weird uber-bully role.  And that the Marauder even thought
they could get away with that reflects very badly on 
Hogwarts.  

Of course, Dumbledore appeared to be cold, manipulative,
and almost contemptuous of Snape until GoF, when he seems 
to have a bit more respect for his spy.  Up to that point,
I had bought the idea that Dumbledore of being basically
decent and very liberal in his respect for others.  

Alla:
> Do you see why Prince tale cannot change  much my interpretation of his character despite new information that it provided?
> 
> Another new (but suspected) information that I learned is that Snape loved Lily. I also learned that he tried to atone for her death in which he was complicit.  But again that makes me hate him more, knowing that he loved Lily and dared to treat her son that way. And every time I read the part where Snape takes from Harry's home part of Lily's letter that makes me very angry. He loved Lily so much that he was quite fine with damaging one of the very few pieces of memories that her son may have of her. And no, I do not think that this letter meant little to Harry, I think it is described in great detail of how much he got from this letter, considering that he had nothing.

Montavilla47:
I'll agree with you that that was a bad moment.  I don't like Snape doing
that either, mainly because I thought of Snape as someone who had 
respect for other people's privacy.  (Unless, of course, they had stolen 
his old potion book and were using it to cheat in class and carve up 
their classmates.)

I think the letter meant a lot to Harry, but it wasn't true that Harry
had nothing of his parents.  In PS/SS, Hagrid gave Harry an entire
scrapbook filled with photos of his parents, which Hagrid had gotten
from their friends.  

But you're right that nothing excuses what Snape does in that moment.
It wasn't his property and he was stealing it.

Alla:
> So, no, no radical changes in interpretation for me. But you said yourself that you also did not change your opinion much, yours was already high and just went down a little bit. Are you saying that Prince tale indeed was supposed to change Snape's character drastically or just give us more information for what we already saw?

Montavilla47:
I think it was meant to radically change the reader's mind about
Snape.  Those readers who finished HBP thinking that Snape had 
been a snake in the Hogwarts grass all along--or that he might 
have been on Dumbledore's side, but had changed his allegiance 
because of Narcissa or for whatever reason.

In other words, the Chapter was meant to change the perspective
of those who believed in ESE Snape.  Those who considered him 
morally ambiguous would probably find him still that way, since 
he was never going to make it all the over into "nice."

It seemed to me, even before DH came out, that JKR was going
for a Pride and Prejudice story with Snape (sans the romance, of
course).  When Elizabeth Bennet first meets Mr. Darcy,  she 
hears him say something completely insulting about her and
pretty much everyone she knows.

Then she hears about him doing some pretty awful things, 
including deliberately breaking up her sister's romance.  

Then, after Elizabeth indignantly rejects Mr. Darcy, she 
starts learning over things about him, and she starts to 
realize that, from his perspective, many of his actions that
she thought were bad turned out to be good.  

But... and this is the important part... not all of them 
were good.  It's not like he *didn't* insult her and 
he tells her that he's proud of breaking up his friend and
her sister.  And then he insults her family some more.

And three hundred pages later, they get married.

But Mr. Darcy doesn't change.  Neither does Elizabeth.
They simply come to understand each better.

I think that's what JKR was going for with Snape and 
Harry (sans the romance).  Neither of them changed
their character, but Harry did come to understand Snape--
and I think that JKR wanted her readers to make that 
same journey.

However, some of us just aren't going to down that
path and some of us had walked down it so many times
before DH came out that we sitting there, tapping our
feet, and  waiting for Harry to catch up.

Alla:
> I do agree though that predicting and analyzing storylines will play a part in being surprised, we indeed probably played out every possible scenario. I wonder whether readers who did not do all that were surprised and changed their opinion of Snape.
> 

Montavilla47:
I wonder that, too.  I guess I should ask my niece and nephew,
since they were too young to read the thousands of posts on
the subject.  

I remember a few people on another forum who said they 
were surprised.  Which surprised me, as I had been arguing
for two solid years that Snape would turn out to be DDM.






From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Fri May  8 11:51:36 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 11:51:36 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtvqvf+mrka@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu16c8+oi00@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186497

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
>
> > jkoney:
> > The difference is that Sirius "knew" for sure that Peter turned his friends over to Voldemort. Snape could only believe second hand reports (like everyone else). Although, Snape had enough connections with the DE's to find out that it was Peter.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> LOL, Sirius is my second favorite character in the books and I was extremely happy when Snape died and more than satisfied the way JKR chose for him to die, that just to give you a brief idea how I feel about Snape, in case you did not figure it out yet ;). But I really do not see much difference here, you know?
> 
> I will never forgive Snape for not listening to Sirius begging and being ready to feed Sirius to dementors. That to me goes beyond holding grudges and beyond anything.
> 
> But are you saying that Snape should not have believed second hand reports? Are you saying that Snape should have done some investigating or something?
> 
> Why? Did he own Sirius something at that point? Now, Dumbledore I want to kick every time I think what he did for one of his soldiers (nothing).
> 
> JMO,
> 
> Alla
>
jkoney
I am saying that Snape along with everyone else didn't investigate the matter and thought (not knew) that Sirius was guilty.

If Snape is as distraught as he is shown, I would think he would like to know for sure. He has contacts among the DE's, he could bring it up either directly or in a roundabout way to see who knew what.


The difference is in the degree of certainty. I may believe in UFO's based on the evidence that other people present. But if I'm driving down a country road and there's one in the middle of the road and they take me inside the ship, I would know that they exist not just believe they do.





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Fri May  8 15:13:58 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 15:13:58 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gu04oo+7q88@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu1i7m+55oh@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186498


> Betsy Hp:
> Honestly, that the books don't obligate readers to go back and re-examine things like that is a reason I'm so squirmy about them.  

Pippin:

The books  force you to re-read in order to understand the plot twists. 

If you're at all into the books,  even vaguely curious, you're going to go back to see if you should have spotted any clues that Fake!Moody was a DE -- and whoa! there he is, torturing people. Do we really need Harry to say, wow, I should have known then? If he did, we wouldn't have to go back and look for the clues, and that wouldn't be nearly so much fun.

DH, which requires a lot of re-thinking, has a plot so twisty that people are still arguing about it. 

If you're at all curious about why Harry doesn't want to use the Elder Wand, even though his friends think he should, then you have to ask yourself whether he thinks he should trust himself with its power, and why or why not. It doesn't work if you don't care about Harry, but if you don't care about Harry, you're not likely to take him as a role model, good or bad. 

The point of right vs easy is that moral awareness can take  effort even from people who are instinctively generous and protective. Just because Harry's instincts are admirable most of the time doesn't mean that they're admirable all the time. IMO, JKR wants to make us realize that it's the same for us as readers. Usually we know right away when our heroes are doing the right thing and when they're not. But not always. 

IMO, JKR's goal isn't to make us want to be moral. She thinks (as a liberal must) that most of us want to be moral already. She wants to show us that moral awareness can be tougher than we think. Since she doesn't want to preach, she leaves it up to us to decide whether it's worth the effort. 

Harry does rethink things occasionally, enough to show us that re-thinking is something people do. But if he did it all the time, then the author would be showing us  that  people will always find out when they've done wrong. But will they? Maybe, if they live long enough. But did Sirius ever realize that he'd mistreated Kreacher? Probably not. It took him almost twenty years to get as far as not being proud of how he'd treated Snape. 

The WW may take centuries to work out that it was wrong to enslave the Elves, just as our culture took centuries to work out that it was wrong to enslave other humans.

A liberal  has to believe that most people mean well, because if they don't, then majority rule is a non-starter. But history tells us the majority  can participate in slavery, torture and  extermination. So it seems that meaning well is not enough.
 
 Snape made it very plain with his disgusting pictures in HBP.
This is what you're fighting, he says  -- the things that enslave and torture and kill. And I was shocked to re-read that, because I too had believed the Dark Arts were poorly defined in canon. But they're really not. It's just that the definition doesn't fit into our familiar little fictional mythology of good guys and bad guys.

I was expecting a definition of what the bad guys do and the good guys don't. But that's not it. They are something that people have to fight, period. As Snape tells Draco, it's childish to think that you won't have to fight them if you're on their side. And, as the books demonstrate, it's also childish to think that you'll be prevented from using them if you're not on their side.

Sometimes it's cruel and selfish leaders and their deluded henchmen who are doing those things, and sometimes it's generally protective and generous people trying to protect themselves or seek revenge. 

Canon shows us a war of good against evil, but it's not being fought by good people on one side and evil people on the other. It's not even being fought by saints against sinners. What I see is  sinful people who think it's worth the effort to try to be virtuous, to try to stop people from hurting each other,  against sinful people who think it isn't. 

Are you saying it was authorial sloppiness that Fake!Moody was an effective teacher?  Didn't Mussolini made the trains run on time? Do  horrible people have to be shown as horrible at everything they do? 

Pippin






From foxmoth at qnet.com  Fri May  8 16:49:56 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 16:49:56 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 13-14
In-Reply-To: <gtvpk5+q8cl@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu1nrk+7lf4@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186499


> Alla:
> 
> Now, knowing that this youth is Grindelwald, it seems to me that by comparing his air of trickery with Fred and George's air of trickery, I think this is one of those moments when JKR is saying that their pranks are not always necessarily good things?

Pippin:
There are lots of places where someone notices that Fred and George's pranks are not always good things. It does not help Ginny when they are jumping out at her to scare her. Ron says that some of the things they do are dangerous, and we see some people get hurt.  Ron says that he's going to talk to them about who they sell their stuff to. And of course they get royally chewed out after the Ton-tongue toffee thing. We can discuss whether some of these things were good, but nobody thinks they were all good.

Nobody wants them to stop being pranksters (except Percy, but he's wrong) but like everyone else they don't always use their power responsibly. However, they do, as they show in several places, recognize that they have a duty to use their power responsibly, if only to stay out of trouble. Grindelwald, if he ever came to that realization, came to it very late in life.

Pippin






From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Fri May  8 17:20:09 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 17:20:09 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 13-14
In-Reply-To: <gu0gdq+8g6r@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu1pk9+c24a@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186500

Zara wrote:
> They were themselves all along. They did not poison Mr. Cattermole with a Puking Pastille in some sort of moment of personality derangement. It was a part of a plan they had worked out in cold blood over the course of weeks.

Carol responds:
"In cold blood" makes them sound like murderers. To be fair, they're new to long-term planning that involves disguises, and overpowering other people to get their robes and name tags, not to mention stealing their identities, seems necessary and Fred and George's products a convenient means for doing so. Just as they don't consider what they'll do once they get inside (a point that someone, perhaps Harry, realizes too late), they don't consider the rightness or wrongness of what they're doing. Would Stunning an innocent person (perhaps causing him or her to bruise his head on the sidewalk) have been any better? Admittedly, Puking Pastilles were a particularly bad choice, but even Nosebleed Nougats or Fainting Fancies involve incapacitating an innocent person.

One purpose served by this scene, intended or unintended, is to show the readers that Fred and George's products are perhaps not quite so amusing as they've previously seemed. (We've already seen another of F&G's products, Peruvian Darkness Powder put to genuinely evil use.) There are two questions here, I think. The first is whether the products are as innocent and clever as they seem (I'd say no, but that's just my opinion); the other is whether, in this instance, the end justifies the means (my instinct is to say no; there must be a better way).

The kids thought that they had come up with a good, if not necessarily brilliant, plan, and it certainly worked, but it contained a number of flaws because of circumstances they didn't anticipate, including making a man so ill that he had to go to St. Mungo's.

Could they have gotten in at all without impersonating MoM employees? And if they did have to impersonate people, how else could they have made sure that those people didn't show up at the MoM and by doing so, reveal the imposture?

All I can think of is that they should have used the Invisibility Cloak. Just using Nosebleed Nougats instead of Puking Pastilles wouldn't really solve all the ethical problems involved--though, admittedly, it would have been less unpleasant for the victim and less revolting for Hermione (who, presumably, won't resort to using them again).

But I agree with Zara that they were themselves all along. Those selves were three teenage kids desperate to get into the MoM to retrieve (okay, steal) a Horcrux from an evil woman in order to destroy it. Excellent motivation (even the stealing can be loosely justified by the fact that it wasn't Umbridge's in the first place and by necessity--the kids have been breaking rules all along for "the greater good"), and they lack the experience and sophistication to come up with a better method, not to mention that Dumbledore himself resorts to Confunding people or ordering them to be Confunded to achieve his ends, and Kingsley thinks nothing of Obliviating Marietta for a similar purpose. And, later, Harry resorts to the Imperius Curse, not only on a Death Eater but on a Goblin who's just trying to do his job. It seems no different to me from Snape Stunning Flitwick so Flitwick can't follow him to the Astronomy Tower. People who are in the way can be used or abused as needed to achieve good or necessary ends.

I don't like it at all, but that's the way it looks to me right now: "All's fair in love and war."

Zara:
> The chapter showed us what Harry and Co. were fighting, in all its gory details. The personal corruption in the new Ministry (worsened, I would say, when Umbridge has her eye, and people threaten relatives of coworkers to obtain services, or turn each other in in hopes of getting their jobs). And of course, the very worst, the treatment of Muggle-born witches and wizards under the new regime. So I think it showed, starkly, what was the underlying motivation of the Trio in this book. (Because it was their disgust and disapproval of what they saw, that motivated them to rescue Mrs. Cattermole and the others).

Carol:
Right. That's the purpose for the chapter, which is quite enlightening in terms of what the Ministry takeover means (and helps to foreshadow a few later incidents, such as Dirk Cresswell's flight from the DEs and all the encounters with Yaxley). Also, of course, we see what Umbridge is up to and just what a horror she really is. Perhaps what's revealed here is JKR's justification for the means the kids used to get into the MoM. It's certainly the lesser of two evils by a long shot. But they didn't know what they would find. They just wanted to get inside. And I don't think they even considered the means they were using as a necessary evil, just a necessity, with the rights of the various MoM employees, including, by a twist of fate, Mafalda Hopkirk (the apparently innocuous author of Harry's expulsion letter) not even considered.

(Quote from DH:) 
> > "Harry could still see the blond-haired youth's face, it was merry, wild; there was a Fred and George-ish air of triumphant trickery about him" - p.233

Carol:
This quotation is quite revealing in terms of Harry's initial reaction, especially in retrospect when we know who the blond boy is. Fred and George's wild inventiveness taken to extremes, and especially their "triumphant trickery," could be extremely dangerous.

But I think, too, that there's a marked (and unstated) contrast with the other really Dark Wizard of our acquaintance, Tom Riddle. Like Tom, Gellert Grindelwald is handsome and, we later learn, extremely intelligent, but his charm is unforced. He's always laughing, in contrast to Tom, who (as a boy) is always serious and cold. His charm, an acquired politeness and seeming interest in others, is only a tool, a means of using others and manipulating them for his own ends. Gellert, in contrast, is lively and merry and wild. He reminds me not so much of Fred and George as of the young Sirius Black. It's easy to see why the young Dumbledore, also brilliant but probably more serious and less inclined to take risks, would have found him not only fascinating but irresistible. Whereas Tom represents the worst of Slytherin, I think that Gellert combines the traits of Ravenclaw and Gryffindor, intellect and recklessness taken to extremes, not as a Riddle-like obsession with self and death but as knowledge and entertainment on a grand scale. But there's an element of Slytherin, too, ambition and a lust for power that dwarfs Voldemort's.

Altogether, Grindelwald is a fascinating figure of whom we don't see enough, a much more appealing and compelling character (IMO) than Voldemort, whom the old Grindelwald, facing death at Voldemort's hands, clearly holds in contempt. He, unlike Voldemort, seems capable of regret and repentance, if not a deep remorse on the level of Snape's for much greater crimes.

To me, he seems (as a merry-faced youth) to be yet another "abandoned boy," expelled from Durmstrang with nowhere to go. Yes, he's already capable of evil, apparently guilty of torturing Aberforth and Ariana and perhaps guilty of killing Ariana, and, yes, he's obsessed with power, Stunning Gregorovitch and stealing the Elder Wand. But I can't help feeling that, with guidance and direction, he could have become great and good rather than great and terrible, in contrast to Tom, who, it seems, never had the potential for good.

Carol, wishing that we knew more about Grindelwald, the golden boy gone wrong




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Fri May  8 17:50:14 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 17:50:14 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu16c8+oi00@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu1rcm+rd35@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186501

jkoney wrote:
> I am saying that Snape along with everyone else didn't investigate the matter and thought (not knew) that Sirius was guilty.
> 
> If Snape is as distraught as he is shown, I would think he would like to know for sure. He has contacts among the DE's, he could bring it up either directly or in a roundabout way to see who knew what.
> 
> The difference is in the degree of certainty. I may believe in UFO's based on the evidence that other people present. But if I'm driving down a country road and there's one in the middle of the road and they take me inside the ship, I would know that they exist not just believe they do.

Carol responds:
Considering that Sirius Black apparently blew up a street, killing twelve Muggles and his supposedly innocent friend, leaving nothing but a finger and left the scene laughing like a maniac (well-known "facts" that even Stan Shunpike was familiar with) and that Dumbledore himself had testified that Black was the Secret Keeper, I see no reason why Snape would want or need to investigate further.

Nor do I think that many DEs knew the identity of Voldemort's Order spy. Bellatrix, coming to Azkaban some months after the Potters' murder, screams about "Wormtail," and perhaps the Lestrange brothers do, too (Barty Jr. more likely screams that he's innocent and quickly succumbs to the Dementors). That doesn't necessarily mean that they knew who Wormtail was, and other DEs might not even have heard the nickname "Wormtail." As Karkaroff says at his hearing, Voldemort kept the identity of many of his DEs secret. It makes sense that the real name of a spy and traitor who was also the friend of the people Voldemort was most eager to kill would be kept as secret as possible, just as Snape's role as spy for Dumbledore was known only to the Wizengamot and not to the Order (or to that busybody, Rita Skeeter, who would have publicized it to the whole WW).

At any rate, canon indicates that Snape did not know the identity of the spy despite suspecting the identity of the makers of the Marauder's Map (for "men" who knew his identity and insulted him? who else could they be?), and, for the reasons given in my first paragraph, he had no reason to investigate it further.

Just as Harry "knew" in DH that Snape had treacherously murdered Dumbledore and wanted revenge, Snape "knew" that Sirius Black had betrayed Lily Potter to her death--and wanted revenge.

Carol, who thinks that Snape and Harry had a great deal in common, as Harry must have subconsciously realized after his visit to the Pensieve in "The Prince's Tale"





From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Fri May  8 18:50:11 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 18:50:11 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu0ij1+iq5h@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu1ut3+iq88@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186502

> Alla:
> > I do agree though that predicting and analyzing storylines will play a part in being surprised, we indeed probably played out every possible scenario. I wonder whether readers who did not do all that were surprised and changed their opinion of Snape.
 
> Montavilla47:
> I wonder that, too.  I guess I should ask my niece and nephew,
> since they were too young to read the thousands of posts on
> the subject.  

Zara:
I can attest to the fact that both extremes were present in the more casual readership. Online, after DH came out, I saw huge numbers of posts on a forum I belong to from new post-DH members basically saying, "I hated Snape after HBP, he was so mean and so evil, and now that he is dead I am sorry I misjudged him like everyone in the books."

On the other hand, my mother, who has never visited any sort of online forum, was nagged mercilessly by me to try the series. After a year of effort by me, she read GoF (she felt she could skip the first three books because she had to watch the movies with her grandsons before...), admitted it was OK, read OotP, ditto, and read HBP.

Immediately after finishing it, she called me (unusual, we usually talk once a week at a set time) to say two things.

1) THANK YOU, Zara, for making me read these books, now I understand why you like them so much ...

... and...

2) Don't you think Snape is going to be a big hero in the last book? 

Like Jo herself said in an interview, she left clues about Snape throughout the series. Readers with a certain style of reading and thinking or possibly with certain types of other reading experiences in their histories (thrillers, gothics) would pick them up and identify Snape as a spy in deep cover or "gothic hero" type; others might not.




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Fri May  8 18:54:45 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 18:54:45 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu16c8+oi00@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu1v5l+q11f@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186503

> jkoney
> I am saying that Snape along with everyone else didn't investigate the matter and thought (not knew) that Sirius was guilty.
> 
> If Snape is as distraught as he is shown, I would think he would like to know for sure. He has contacts among the DE's, he could bring it up either directly or in a roundabout way to see who knew what.
> 
> 
> The difference is in the degree of certainty. I may believe in UFO's based on the evidence that other people present. But if I'm driving down a country road and there's one in the middle of the road and they take me inside the ship, I would know that they exist not just believe they do.

Alla:

Ah, thanks for clarifying. To me it depends on what reason you would think Snape should do more investigation. Now, if he wants to feed Sirius to dementors, then oh YES, you do not have to convince me, he is better be damn sure, if he wants to feed the man to this creatures, that he is really really guilty.

But if we are talking about Snape wanting to know more when Sirius is still in Azkaban, then again I see no reason for him to do so.

As far as he knows traitor is in Azkaban and likely never to leave it. I do not see why he should be concerned with investigating if that makes sense. I do not see why he should be concerned any more than anybody else is.

Dumbledore? Yes, as far as I am concerned, Sirius was the part of the group of the selected few soldiers/volunteers, whatever you call them, which he presumably handpicked. And he does nothing to even double check?

And he gives "evidence" on that hearing that Sirius was a secret keeper? Right, strong evidence they were, which evaporated after one conversation with Sirius (and I am guessing Legilimence use) in PoA.

All that he had to do is to go to the house himself instead of sending Hagrid and talk to Sirius as far as I am concerned. Yes, we would have had no story, however within the story I will always find his behavior to be pretty despicable.

I would think Remus would want to do more investigating as well. After all Sirius was his friend.

But Snape? Why? They are not friends, they have plenty of bad blood between them, unless Snape's grudge  is something Snape wants to **act** upon as he did in PoA, I do not see why he should have ever wanted to do more investigation.

JMO,

Alla






From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Fri May  8 20:06:22 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 20:06:22 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 13-14
In-Reply-To: <gu1pk9+c24a@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu23bu+orka@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186504

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> Zara wrote:
> > They were themselves all along. They did not poison Mr. Cattermole with a Puking Pastille in some sort of moment of personality derangement. It was a part of a plan they had worked out in cold blood over the course of weeks.
> 
> Carol responds:
> "In cold blood" makes them sound like murderers. To be fair, they're new to long-term planning that involves disguises, and overpowering other people to get their robes and name tags, not to mention stealing their identities, seems necessary and Fred and George's products a convenient means for doing so. 

Montavilla47:

Hehe.  But they do!  They did a dress rehearsal of this stunt in 
CoS, when they polyjuiced Crabbe and Goyle. Only, they were
a bit smarter when they were pre-teens, since they used a 
sleeping draught, rather than a Puking Pastille.


Carol:
Just as they don't consider what they'll do once they get inside (a point that someone, perhaps Harry, realizes too late), 

Montavilla47:
Something in common with the CoS polyjuicing, since they 
didn't consider that they'd need the Slytherin password to
enter the dungeon common room.  However, they did have a
better general plan in CoS, since they had, at least, the plan
of asking Draco about the Heir. 

Carol:
...they don't consider the rightness or wrongness of what they're doing. Would Stunning an innocent person (perhaps causing him or her to bruise his head on the sidewalk) have been any better? Admittedly, Puking Pastilles were a particularly bad choice, but even Nosebleed Nougats or Fainting Fancies involve incapacitating an innocent person.

Montavilla47:

What's disturbing when you really think about this chapter
(which I hadn't really done earlier), is that we know that 
people don't stop puking, fainting, or bleeding until they
get the antedote.  (Well, maybe they stop fainting?)


Carol:
> One purpose served by this scene, intended or unintended, is to show the readers that Fred and George's products are perhaps not quite so amusing as they've previously seemed. (We've already seen another of F&G's products, Peruvian Darkness Powder put to genuinely evil use.) There are two questions here, I think. The first is whether the products are as innocent and clever as they seem (I'd say no, but that's just my opinion); the other is whether, in this instance, the end justifies the means (my instinct is to say no; there must be a better way).

Montavilla47:
We didn't really need this chapter to point out that the
Skiving candies were dangerous.  We saw that when 
Katie (or was it Alicia) nearly bled out after eating one 
of the Nosebleed Nougats in OotP.

But this is even a little worse, if you think about it, since
the Twins were aware of the dangers of their candies and
took care of Alicia when things got bad.  


Carol:
> The kids thought that they had come up with a good, if not necessarily brilliant, plan, and it certainly worked, but it contained a number of flaws because of circumstances they didn't anticipate, including making a man so ill that he had to go to St. Mungo's.
> 
> Could they have gotten in at all without impersonating MoM employees? And if they did have to impersonate people, how else could they have made sure that those people didn't show up at the MoM and by doing so, reveal the imposture?

Montavilla47:
I was thinking about this earlier in replying to another
post--and I forget whether I ended up posting it or not.

One thing I think they could have done was to ask Arthur
to allow them to impersonate him--and simply have him
stay home that day.  Or they could have asked him if he'd
seen Umbridge wearing a locket at work--and gone from 
there.

I think it would have been a lot easier to find out where
Umbridge lived and start searching there.  People are far
more likely to leave their jewelry in their home than in
their office.  I don't know if the wizards have a directory,
but it seems like they should.

They could have had Hermione (as the most capable of 
the three) assume the look of a Muggle or simply change
her looks as she did with Ron by using transfiguration 
and apply for a job in the Floo department.  Once in, she
could try to find Umbridge's home floo... number or address
or whatever it is that they use.  

With all the extra work of recording and imprisoning or
otherwise persecuting Muggleborns, the Ministry would
need to b hiring like mad.  I'm sure Hermione could get
a fake birth certificate and alter her O.W.L. certificate to
qualify for a clerk position.

Or, failing all that, we saw in OotP that it's pitifully easy
to break into the Ministry--as long as you go after hours.
Both the Order and the Death Eaters broke into the place
several times over the course of the year.  The Trio might
have done that.

In any case, I think it was a mistake to try and get all
three of them into the Ministry at once.  It would have 
been a lot simpler to kidnap one person and send in
one of the Trio.  I think, in that case, Harry would have
been the best bet.  He's good under pressure and 
can think on his feet. 






From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Fri May  8 21:50:09 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 21:50:09 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu1rcm+rd35@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu29eh+4rt7@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186505

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> jkoney wrote:
> > I am saying that Snape along with everyone else didn't investigate the matter and thought (not knew) that Sirius was guilty.
> > 
> > If Snape is as distraught as he is shown, I would think he would like to know for sure. He has contacts among the DE's, he could bring it up either directly or in a roundabout way to see who knew what.
> > 
> > The difference is in the degree of certainty. I may believe in UFO's based on the evidence that other people present. But if I'm driving down a country road and there's one in the middle of the road and they take me inside the ship, I would know that they exist not just believe they do.
> 
> Carol responds:
> Considering that Sirius Black apparently blew up a street, killing twelve Muggles and his supposedly innocent friend, leaving nothing but a finger and left the scene laughing like a maniac (well-known "facts" that even Stan Shunpike was familiar with) and that Dumbledore himself had testified that Black was the Secret Keeper, I see no reason why Snape would want or need to investigate further.
> 
> Nor do I think that many DEs knew the identity of Voldemort's Order spy. Bellatrix, coming to Azkaban some months after the Potters' murder, screams about "Wormtail," and perhaps the Lestrange brothers do, too (Barty Jr. more likely screams that he's innocent and quickly succumbs to the Dementors). That doesn't necessarily mean that they knew who Wormtail was, and other DEs might not even have heard the nickname "Wormtail." As Karkaroff says at his hearing, Voldemort kept the identity of many of his DEs secret. It makes sense that the real name of a spy and traitor who was also the friend of the people Voldemort was most eager to kill would be kept as secret as possible, just as Snape's role as spy for Dumbledore was known only to the Wizengamot and not to the Order (or to that busybody, Rita Skeeter, who would have publicized it to the whole WW).
> 
> At any rate, canon indicates that Snape did not know the identity of the spy despite suspecting the identity of the makers of the Marauder's Map (for "men" who knew his identity and insulted him? who else could they be?), and, for the reasons given in my first paragraph, he had no reason to investigate it further.
> 
> Just as Harry "knew" in DH that Snape had treacherously murdered Dumbledore and wanted revenge, Snape "knew" that Sirius Black had betrayed Lily Potter to her death--and wanted revenge.
> 
> Carol, who thinks that Snape and Harry had a great deal in common, as Harry must have subconsciously realized after his visit to the Pensieve in "The Prince's Tale"

jkoney:
I'm saying he could have investigated further. I think it's safe to say he was feeling depressed after the Potter's were killed. I would think that he would keep going over the facts as he knows them. The one thing that would stand out is that Sirius and James were the closest of friends. I would also assume that through the Hogwarts grapevine that he would have heard that Sirius Black left his home and moved in with James and family. In a community as small as the wizarding world (and his feelings for Lily) I would also guess that he knew that he was the best man at the wedding.

Given that Snape is intelligent I would think that he would wonder how Sirius a "reckless Gryffindor" could turn his back on his family.

Given his relationship with Dumbledore I would think that he knew that Sirius was put in prison without a trial. Which means that no one tested his wand to see if he cast the curses to kill the muggles and Peter.

If I was that devoted to Lilly, I would want to make sure. Since he has the contacts with the DE's he could as I suggested before attempt to gather the information. While Voldemort may have kept Peter hidden, we know that Bellatrix knew about him. It would also make sense that someone such as Malfoy would also know. 

I realize that this didn't happen in canon. But someone upthread asked something like why I thought Snape would be mad at himself when he found out that Sirius was innocent. I would guess that the Snape in canon, after he found out, did think about the facts that he thought he knew and realized that they didn't all fit together.

(I hope this also clears up Alla's questions for me)
jkoney





From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Fri May  8 22:19:43 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 22:19:43 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP
Message-ID: <gu2b5v+2t9p@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186506

Carol posted this on OT, but I thought it also fits here.

Carol
Anyone care to comment on JKR's sense of humor and why a particular example is
(or isn't) funny in your view? I'm not talking about crude juvenile humor like
Ron's "Uranus" puns, which are obviously geared to preadolescent or early
adolescent boys. I'm talking about humor that appeals to adult readers like
us--not just the sexual innuendos or the puns, but anything that isn't broad,
slapstick, obvious humor.

I realize that humor is subjective and that not everyone shares JKR's sense of
humor, but some lines are laugh-out-loud funny. (One that I remember offhand is
Fred in GoF addressing Percy as "Weatherby." I don't know why I found that
funny. Maybe it was the element of surprise. It seems to me that many of JKR's
funniest lines hit the reader with something unexpected at the end. Quite
possibly, they're not funny out of context (like the one about the Prime
Minister "naturally" thinking that he'd gone mad. And I'm not sure that they
qualify as understated humor, which (as I understand it) takes something dire
or drastic or disastrous (like real madness) and treats it in a trivial way. Or
maybe I have the concept all wrong.

Carol, suspecting that her own sense of humor is idiosyncratic and inexplicable


jkoney:
I found the books to be quite funny. It's probably one of the reasons I enjoyed them, especially during the first reading of each book.

I thought she incorporated a lot of different types of humor in the books. There is the teenage boy (some call it crude) humor like Ron's Uranus jokes that are like a smack in the face.

There is put down humor like Fred using Weatherby to refer to Percy. Or the references to the cauldron bottoms, big head boy on the prefects badge, etc. Those are used quite well to deflate Percy's big head. (kind of like channeling a nice Don Rickles)

There is the observational humor of looking at how the wizards are dressed in the GoF when they try to pass as muggles, or how disorganized the Weasley's are when it's time to head to the train each year. (sort of like Jerry Seinfeld)

There is complete mocking of the situation when the twins are saying all those things about Harry in CoS. They don't think Harry is to blame and are using an overt amount of sarcasm to get their point across.

Then there is slapstick. All the pranks would be a vaudville performers dream come true. During all of those scenes (twins or Marauders) I had the feeling that the Three Stooges, Abbot & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, or the Marx Brothers would have had a field day with the things they could have done.

I realize the slapstick pranks are not appreciated by everyone. I think part of the reason is that we are thinking like muggles. The wizarding world has joke shops that sell these items, so a large portion of society must just consider them harmless. If you have the ability to undo the prank with little effort then it really is harmless. 

I also think that part of the reason people don't like the pranks is because they (personally) don't like that type of humor. That is fine with me, but I think a majority of the wizarding world (the young wizards and witches) do like it. Neither the twins or the Marauders were ostricized by any large segment of the school (not counting house rivalries) because of it.

Can a joke go to far? Yes, I believe it can. Unfortunately, most of the time you don't know you've gone too far until afterwards.

jkoney, who kind of went on a tangent from Carol's original question. 





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sat May  9 01:03:38 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 01:03:38 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <gu2b5v+2t9p@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu2kpa+s49v@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186507

Carol (moved from OT by jkoney):
> Anyone care to comment on JKR's sense of humor and why a particular example is (or isn't) funny in your view? I'm not talking about crude juvenile humor like Ron's "Uranus" puns, which are obviously geared to preadolescent or early adolescent boys. I'm talking about humor that appeals to adult readers like us--not just the sexual innuendos or the puns, but anything that isn't broad, slapstick, obvious humor.
> 
> I realize that humor is subjective and that not everyone shares JKR's sense of humor, but some lines are laugh-out-loud funny. <snip> It seems to me that many of JKR's funniest lines hit the reader with something unexpected at the end. Quite possibly, they're not funny out of context <snip> And I'm not sure that they qualify as understated humor, which (as I understand it) takes something dire or drastic or disastrous (like real madness) and treats it in a trivial way. Or maybe I have the concept all wrong. <snip>

jkoney responded::
> I found the books to be quite funny. It's probably one of the reasons I enjoyed them, especially during the first reading of each book.
> 
> I thought she incorporated a lot of different types of humor in the books. There is the teenage boy (some call it crude) humor <snip>
> 
> There is put down humor <snip>
> 
> There is the observational humor <snip>
> 
> There is complete mocking of the situation <snip>
> 
> Then there is slapstick. <snip>
 
> Can a joke go to far? Yes, I believe it can. Unfortunately, most of the time you don't know you've gone too far until afterwards.
> 
> jkoney, who kind of went on a tangent from Carol's original question.

Carol again:
Thanks for retrieving my lost post, which I'd forgotten about. The reason I posted it on OT was that I was hoping for someone British to help me with the famous concept of understated British humor. I don't think that JKR's sense of humor quite qualifies most of the time. The puns might: "griffin door knocker" (Gryffindor knocker) is so subtle that it probably goes right over the heads of most readers. But the examples you mention, especially the teenage boy humor (so crude that it strikes me as preteen) and the slapstick are anything but understated. JKR has a penchant for hyperbole, especially in dealing (sorry to say) with fat people. Slughorn, for example, takes up a quarter of the shop when he encounters the Trio at Honeydukes. Dudley at age thirteen or so (I forgot which book) has finally succeeded in becoming as broad as he is tall.

The examples I like best are different. For example, two things make Harry nearly laugh out loud at, of all occasions, Dumbledore's funeral. One is Dumbledore's (to me endearing) idea of a few words: Nitwit, blubber, oddment, tweak. The other is Grawp (whom I don't even like) gently patting Hagrid on the head so that Hagrid's chair legs sink into the ground. I'm not sure why the first one is funny. I suppose it's because the words themselves are so odd and the idea of a seemingly dignified old professor taking "a few words" absolutely literally is so eccentric and so unexpected that you can't help chuckling at the mental image. The second conjures a somewhat comical mental image, but what I like about it is that it takes the hyperbole usually applied to Hagrid when he pats the Trio on the head or the shoulder and transfers it to Grawp, in a way standing it on its head.

Anyway, I don't mind at all that you've gone off on a bit of a tangent from my original post. I do that all the time myself, using someone else's post to stimulate my own thoughts on a topic rather than answering their points directly.

I think your categories are a good start, but I think there are others as well, wordplay being the most obvious (the authors of the Hogwarts textbooks, for example). The footnotes in Quidditch through the Ages seem to spoof academic treatises, IIRC.
 
It's obvious what makes, say, the description of Bob Ogden in the first Gaunt memory or old Archie at the QWC humorous--incongruity. Both are innocently wearing completely inappropriate clothing with no idea how absurd they look. And I have a feeling that incongruity is the key to the more subtle examples as well--that or the element of surprise. I'll be crying over Neville's visit to his parents in St. Mungo's, surely one of the most touching moments in the books, and then laugh out loud at Gilderoy Lockhart (whom I don't even like) protesting, "I didn't learn joined-up writing for nothing, you know!"

That last example doesn't seem funny now as I look back at it, but I'm sure that I laughed in shock the first time through, and I'm pretty sure that JKR, who could easily have left it out, is deliberately contrasting the tragedy of Neville's parents with the dark comedy of Lockhart.

Someone once defined comedy as tragedy with a happy ending (or something like that). Potentially terrible things (like being fed a Ton-tongue Toffee and choking on your enlarged tongue) become funny (to some people) if the consequences aren't fatal or lasting. It's the rationale behind slapstick humor. But I don't think that definition explains the examples I've referred to, or even Lockhart's ironic "This is just like magic!" in CoS.

I keep trying to figure out her secret. *Why* is this passage (any passage that makes me laugh) funny? And I can't seem to find a satisfactory answer. Maybe I'm being too analytical. :-)

Carol, who was once told that laughter is a sign of embarrassment but doesn't think that's the answer, either




From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Sat May  9 02:04:14 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 02:04:14 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu29eh+4rt7@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu2oau+h678@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186508

> jkoney:
> I'm saying he could have investigated further. I think it's safe to say he was feeling depressed after the Potter's were killed. I would think that he would keep going over the facts as he knows them. 

Zara:
The questions you raise have easy answers, which could have occured to Snape.

> jkoney:
> The one thing that would stand out is that Sirius and James were the closest of friends. 

Zara:
ANd Severus knew Sirius had betrayed a very important secret of another close friend, Remus Lupin, to an enemy (Snape himself).

> jkoney:
>I would also assume that through the Hogwarts grapevine that he would have heard that Sirius Black left his home and moved in with James and family. In a community as small as the wizarding world (and his feelings for Lily) I would also guess that he knew that he was the best man at the wedding.
> 
> Given that Snape is intelligent I would think that he would wonder how Sirius a "reckless Gryffindor" could turn his back on his family.

Zara:
Because as you say yourself, he had done it before.

> jkoney:
> Given his relationship with Dumbledore I would think that he knew that Sirius was put in prison without a trial. Which means that no one tested his wand to see if he cast the curses to kill the muggles and Peter.

Zara:
You do not mention that Snape had excellent reason to believe Sirius was the Secret Keeper, also from his closeness to Albus. There was incontrovertible evidence that the secret was betrayed.

I find it reasonable that no one investigated further. All the most likley principals (ALbus, Severus, Remus) had good reasons not to doubt Sirius's apparent guilt.





From willsonkmom at msn.com  Sat May  9 02:10:07 2009
From: willsonkmom at msn.com (potioncat)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 02:10:07 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 13-14
In-Reply-To: <gu1pk9+c24a@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu2olv+t8g6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186509


> Carol responds:

> All I can think of is that they should have used the Invisibility Cloak. Just using Nosebleed Nougats instead of Puking Pastilles wouldn't really solve all the ethical problems involved--though, admittedly, it would have been less unpleasant for the victim and less revolting for Hermione (who, presumably, won't resort to using them again).

Potioncat;
But, either an unstoppable nosebleed or persistent vomiting can kill a person. I can't get to the book, did I read here that Mr. Cattermole had gone to St. Mungo's? Good thing they were able to come up with an antidote. That's the frightening thing, how would the Trio get the other half of the candy to the victim? I presume JKR didn't intend for any of the victims to be in critical condition. Perhaps it seemed reasonable to her that the effects would wear off with time, but that's not how it was shown in the books.

For me, at the first read, the worst part about Mr. Cattermole was that he wasn't just anyone going to work, he was going to his wife's trial. Can't you imagine the fear he felt, not knowing what was happening to her? The feeling of having let her down, knowing that she would be frightened and wondering where he was? Was he afraid he might not get to see her again?







From willsonkmom at msn.com  Sat May  9 02:28:01 2009
From: willsonkmom at msn.com (potioncat)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 02:28:01 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <gu2kpa+s49v@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu2pnh+e82b@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186510


> 
> Carol again:
> Thanks for retrieving my lost post, which I'd forgotten about. The reason I posted it on OT was that I was hoping for someone British to help me with the famous concept of understated British humor. I don't think that JKR's sense of humor quite qualifies most of the time. The puns might: "griffin door knocker" (Gryffindor knocker) is so subtle that it probably goes right over the heads of most readers. But the examples you mention, especially the teenage boy humor (so crude that it strikes me as preteen) and the slapstick are anything but understated. JKR has a penchant for hyperbole, especially in dealing (sorry to say) with fat people. Slughorn, for example, takes up a quarter of the shop when he encounters the Trio at Honeydukes. Dudley at age thirteen or so (I forgot which book) has finally succeeded in becoming as broad as he is tall.

Potioncat:
One thing that's different about British humour from American humor is the timing. I'm not sure if that shows so much in a written work, but it might. An American author might set up the scene differently. Does anyone know?---The only thing I can think of is some very funny lines in Austen, but I can't think of an American work to compare it to.

Back to timing, there is a British show I like very much, As Time Goes By. It's not unusual for something funny to happen, but the action goes on without a pause--unless the characters themselves are supposed to react to it. In fact, I've missed jokes, or had a delayed reaction because the action had kept on moving.

Is that sort of what you had in mind?

As for what I found humorous...a series of puns based on Divination. DD says something about never having taken Divination himself and so could not foresee how much trouble the class would be be. And Percy tells Harry to take Divination because it's never too early to think about your future.

I love that sort of joke. A few others were particularly funny because I missed them at first--especially some of the names that are real puns when you hear them out loud.




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Sat May  9 02:46:54 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 02:46:54 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 13-14
In-Reply-To: <gu2olv+t8g6@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu2qqu+j16f@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186511


> 
> Potioncat;
> But, either an unstoppable nosebleed or persistent vomiting can kill a person. I can't get to the book, did I read here that Mr. Cattermole had gone to St. Mungo's? Good thing they were able to come up with an antidote. That's the frightening thing, how would the Trio get the other half of the candy to the victim?

Pippin:

Skiving Snackboxes were being sold publicly as of HBP, so the antidotes wouldn't be secret or hard to get. I'm sure St. Mungo's had seen this kind of thing plenty of times by DH. After all, it's not unusual for trick candies to go astray.

Pippin






From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sat May  9 02:50:35 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 02:50:35 -0000
Subject: Snape Snape Snape WAS: Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu0ij1+iq5h@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu2r1r+fkv5@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186512

Alla:
And it was always in my mind as possibility which I hoped will not come true.

Montavilla47:
<SNIP>
I hear you. I was hoping that Harry wouldn't turn into Christ.
We all have our disappointments.<SNIP>

Alla:

I know I said it in post DH past and probably more than once, but I still want to make this correction again. I **thought** that Snape working for good side will be a disappointment for me, but that was before book came out.

It is of course up to you whether to take my word for it or not, but believe me, while I did not get the plot development that I hoped for, I was extremely satisfied with the development JKR chose for Snape.

JKR gave me Snape whom I can continue hate in good faith, if that makes sense, while acknowledging his heroic deeds lol.

JKR could have drawn Snape to be a very different animal, somebody whom I would be forced to stop hating and acknowledge  what I would perceive as a very different character. For example, she could have done a Snape, who changed his mind not because Lily died, but really just because he figured out that Voldemort's plans for the humanity are very very bad plans indeed. Oh I know he grows to value life, but that is so totally not what I have in mind.

Most importantly JKR could have done the final confrontation between Harry and Snape, because really not only many Snape fans that I know wanted this confrontation, some of the Snape haters (me) really wanted this confrontation as well, heh. Only I was hoping for Harry for once being in power and Snape (evil or for himself) being humiliated and with no power whatsoever.

Was I disappointed that I did not get this confrontation? Since Snape turned out to be Dumbledore!Man, of course I was not disappointed! Because you see, what JKR could have also done is to make this confrontation to go the way so many Snape fans wanted. You know, Snape do the gloating, etc, tell Harry that I never hated you Potter, etc, etc,  I do not care much for you one way or another.

But she did not do that, she made Snape die and Harry granting his forgiveness, believe me, I was very happy with this development since she chose to do DD! Snape. Boy I would never imagine that Dumbledore!man  Snape would made me happy.

But yes, Snape's admission that he never hated Harry would have been a major bomb for me, heh. Instead she places what I feel more support in DH that yes, Snape did hate Harry in my view.

And of course dying in Shrieking Shack from Nagini's bite, I cannot think of anything more fitting for him, for somebody who (in my view) would never forgive James saving his life. Well, as far as I am concerned Severus dear got his wish.

Oh, and of course she could leave him alive and made the possibility come true that future generations of Hogwarts kids will have him as a teacher or Headmaster (shudders).

Montavilla47:
It sounds like that was a deal-breaker for you. It wasn't
ever a deal-breaker for me. But then, it wasn't something
that struck me as particularly brutal. That's just me.
<SNIP>

Alla:

You mean how Snape treated Harry was a deal breaker for me? Oh absolutely and most definitely it was.


Montavilla47:
<SNIP>
I think that's what JKR was going for with Snape and
Harry (sans the romance). Neither of them changed
their character, but Harry did come to understand Snape--
and I think that JKR wanted her readers to make that
same journey.

However, some of us just aren't going to down that
path and some of us had walked down it so many times
before DH came out that we sitting there, tapping our
feet, and waiting for Harry to catch up.

Alla:

And some of us walked that path, saw where that path leads and came back heh.








From willsonkmom at msn.com  Sat May  9 02:54:07 2009
From: willsonkmom at msn.com (potioncat)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 02:54:07 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 13-14
In-Reply-To: <gu2qqu+j16f@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu2r8f+p15v@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186513

 
> Pippin:
> 
> Skiving Snackboxes were being sold publicly as of HBP, so the antidotes wouldn't be secret or hard to get. I'm sure St. Mungo's had seen this kind of thing plenty of times by DH. After all, it's not unusual for trick candies to go astray.


Potioncat:
Good point.

So, I wonder how well they worked in the class rooms if the teachers knew what was going on? I wouldn't put it past Snape to confiscate the other half of the candy, conjure a bucket, and tell the student to tough it out.




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Sat May  9 14:55:46 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 14:55:46 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 13-14
In-Reply-To: <gu2r8f+p15v@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu45hi+lnqd@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186514


> 
> Potioncat:
> Good point.
> 
> So, I wonder how well they worked in the class rooms if the teachers knew what was going on? I wouldn't put it past Snape to confiscate the other half of the candy, conjure a bucket, and tell the student to tough it out.
>

Pippin:

Heh. But Snape's never tried to keep an injured student from going to the hospital wing. And he likes the attention of his class focused on him, not on a puking student. OTOH, antidotes are a specialty of his ... I wouldn't put it past him to take the opportunity to  demonstrate one which just happened to have  distressing side effects.

Come to think of it, do we ever hear of the snackboxes being used for their intended purpose? The *idea*  is funny, a riff on the way some kids  get psychosomatic symptoms. My brother used to develop a fever and upset stomach sufficient to keep him home and recover precisely at 3:15 PM when school let out. But  a child deliberately poisoning herself to get out of class, even if the antidote is handy? 

Pippin





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sat May  9 17:35:07 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 17:35:07 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 13-14
In-Reply-To: <gu45hi+lnqd@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu4esb+rga3@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186515

Pippin wrote:
> 
> Heh. But Snape's never tried to keep an injured student from going to the hospital wing. And he likes the attention of his class focused on him, not on a puking student. OTOH, antidotes are a specialty of his ... I wouldn't put it past him to take the opportunity to  demonstrate one which just happened to have  distressing side effects.
> 
> Come to think of it, do we ever hear of the snackboxes being used for their intended purpose? The *idea*  is funny, a riff on the way some kids  get psychosomatic symptoms. My brother used to develop a fever and upset stomach sufficient to keep him home and recover precisely at 3:15 PM when school let out. But a child deliberately poisoning herself to get out of class, even if the antidote is handy? 

Carol responds:
I doubt that any student was foolish enough to attempt it with Snape. It's probably not so much what he would really do (probably send them to the hospital wing or give them an effective antidote) as what they feared he would do that deters them, just as Harry would never have dared to present a Bezoar instead of an attempt at an antidote for multiple poisons if Snape were still Potions master in HBP.

However, I do recall an epidemic of "Umbridgitis" near the end of OoP:

"Meanwhile it became clear just how many Skiving Snackboxes Fred and George had managed to sell before leaving Hogwarts, Umbridge had only to enter her classroom for the students assembled there to faint, vomit, develop dangerous fevers, or else spout blood from both nostrils. Shrieking with rage and frustration she attempted to trace the mysterious symptoms to their source, but the students told her stubbornly they were suffering from 'Umbridge-itis'" (OoP am. ed. 677-78).

Of course, these students are inflicting these symptoms on themselves and they have the antidote at hand, so it's a completely different matter from handing an unsuspecting person a dangerous candy with no antidote at hand (and, in Hermione's case, insisting that they eat it).

To return to the kids using Skiving Snackboxes to get out of Umbridge's but not Snape's, in part they're following Fred and George's example, giving the unpopular tyrant and usurper of Dumbledore's rightful position as hard a time as possible and in part they're (intentionally or otherwise) demonstrating her powerlessness and incompetence. They also, presumably, resent her totally useless classes (as we know that the DA members do).

The fact that such tactics are never used against Snape, despite his unpopularity at least among the Gryffindors, indicates several things, IMO. He's not a Ministry outsider stepping in to "interfere at Hogwarts" but a legitimate member of the staff; he would never put up with or be flustered by such nonsense and the consequences for anyone who attempted it would probably be a most unpleasant detention (rather than an antidote with side effects); and Snape, much as some students may dislike his classes, never teaches useless rubbish. (Harry doesn't resume the DA after Snape takes over DADA; he may disagree with Snape about the best way to fight Dementors, but he never implies that Snape isn't doing his job.)

Carol, who got a bit sidetracked from Pippin's point here but thought that the contrast was interesting




From k12listmomma at comcast.net  Sat May  9 19:10:29 2009
From: k12listmomma at comcast.net (k12listmomma)
Date: Sat, 9 May 2009 13:10:29 -0600
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
References: <gtup4q+s99m@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <7C86D46FE0214E27AAD5FAD7AEDCE899@homemain>

No: HPFGUIDX 186516

> > > PoA (speaker is Snape):
> > > "Like father, like son, Potter! I have just saved your neck; you 
> > > should be thanking me on bended knee! You would have been well served 
> > > if he'd killed you! You'd have died like your father, too arrogant to 
> > > believe you might be mistaken in Black -- now get out of the way, or I 
> > > will make you. GET OUT OF THE WAY, POTTER!"

Pippin:
As the someone in question, I want to make it clear that I didn't mean 
Snape's whole life was a waste, just that the waste was life long. And I 
also don't think the grudge was just about the prank, or James's schoolboy 
arrogance.

It was about  James's arrogance in refusing to believe that someone close to 
him had turned traitor and was keeping the Dark Lord informed of his and 
Lily's movements.

Shelley:
But, was James wrong? Not entirely. He believed in Sirius, and in Lupin. The 
only one of his "friends" that he was wrong about was Peter.

But, notice that when Snape says these words, he is also incorrect, in that 
he believes the traitor is Sirius, and that wrongly faults James for 
believing in Sirius. In reality, James was correct in believing in Sirius, 
as Harry was doing at the moment of this quote. Snape's arrogance comes from 
the fault that he doesn't acknowledge he doesn't have all the pieces of the 
puzzle. But, I have noticed that people who hold a grudge are often blinded 
to any facts that would alleviate or diminish that grudge. Snape's refusal 
to see the truth here is mostly out of his need to KEEP HATING James (which 
I think is primarily for "stealing his girl". The grudge, the prank, is just 
a sidetrack early in the story to keep us from figuring out too early on 
that Snape had Lilly-lust.) I agree the waste was life-long, and on that 
point, it's a shame that Snape never got over his Lilly obsession, or that 
he never accepted truly his responsibility for killing her and the ones she 
loved. Had he been more truthful to himself, he would have been easy to see 
the truth about other events too (such as Peter's role).




From inishumina at yahoo.co.uk  Thu May  7 23:48:27 2009
From: inishumina at yahoo.co.uk (Toni)
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 23:48:27 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtvr3i+7li4@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gtvs0b+pd58@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186517

Hi, look I'm getting really confused about the whole thing, Why is Harry called a Half-Blood when both parents are magic and Vol is Half-Blood, which is only natural as it was only his mother was a witch. Could some one explain this please!!!

Toni



From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Sat May  9 19:36:07 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 19:36:07 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gtvs0b+pd58@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu4lv7+d3rd@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186518

Toni:
> Hi, look I'm getting really confused about the whole thing, Why is Harry called a Half-Blood when both parents are magic and Vol is Half-Blood, which is only natural as it was only his mother was a witch. Could some one explain this please!!!

Magpie:
Half-blood's used inconsistently so you're probably right to be confused! 

Basically, in Harry's case since his mother was Muggle-born (and so has Muggle blood) he's considered a half-blood by some. He's definitely not a Pureblood, which refers to Wizards whose ancestry goes back quite far without any known Muggles. Although JKR claims the split is 25/50/25 there are really probably vanishingly few Purebloods in the WW, with most people being half-bloods meaning that there's some Muggle blood in there they know about.

Snape, for instance, has a parent who was an actual Muggle, but blood-wise Lily and Tobias Snape were both born of Muggle parents.

Does that make sense? Harry's ancestry is known to be Pureblood on his father's side and pure muggle on his mother's side. 

-m




From catlady at wicca.net  Sat May  9 20:07:25 2009
From: catlady at wicca.net (Catlady (Rita Prince Winston))
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 20:07:25 -0000
Subject: afterlife/ Wormtail, Wormtail, Wormtail / That Crucio
Message-ID: <gu4npt+os0h@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186519

Carol wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186427>:

<< And if Lupin can be happy in the afterlife, free of the ravages of his lycanthropy, I see no reason why Snape can't be happy, too, freed of regret and resentment and bitterness. I'd like to think that he and the three "good" Marauders at last understand and respect each other. >>

This is a forbidden "I agree" post. Since Severus is set on being with Lily in the afterlife, and Lily is set on being with James in the afterlife, and James is set on being with Sirius in the afterlife, and Remus is set on being with Sirius in the afterlife (or, more canonically, with James, but this makes a better chain), they had BETTER all learn to like each other, or it will be a very quarrelsome afterlife. Maybe they'll reincarnate as squabbling siblings.

Carol wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186428>:

<< Clearly, the right choice in that instance was to hold out against threats and torture and keep the secret with which he had been entrusted. >>

Since Sirius's testimony that Peter had left his hiding place with no signs of violence or being kidnapped by Death Eaters, it has not been clear to me that Peter simply yielded to threats and torture. He may have yielded to being offered a big bribe (bigger than 'I won't kill you') instead. SWM indicates that Peter was already of bad character as a schoolboy, not merely weak.

Even tho' I think weak makes a better backstory, in which he could have been tricked (like young Bagman) into treason rather than choosing it. In my fanfic, tricked by being seduced by a beautiful girl rather than by being told he was serving the anti-Voldemort side. And so unwilling to admit he had been follish and beg for forgiveness from the friends he had betrayed that he decided to avoid it by helping kill them. 

<< Just how returning to Voldemort, talking to rats and other small animals to track down the monster that's possessing and killing them, qualifies as an easy choice, I'm not sure. Surely, living in the sewers would be easier--and less dangerous. >> 

More "I agree". I really can't understand why Wormtail sought out and revived Voldemort. He must have known it would be laborious, unpleasant, and dangerous, and I can't see how he benefitted from it more than from finding a new sucker to keep him in idle luxury as a pet rat -- a sucker in a foreign country if he's really so scared that Remus and Sirius will find him and kill him.

Pippin wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186432>:

<< Ironically the belief that such a spell did exist may have been what convinced Voldemort that the Elder Wand had failed him. >>

Insightful!

<< Peter knows that once the Ministry knows he is still alive, the DE's still at large will find out too. He will have no protector, and Peter can't face life without a protector, even one that he loathes as much as Voldemort. >>

I am not convinced that Peter thinks the DEs still at large are after him. Would they even know he existed? Okay, Sirius said he heard DEs in Azkaban screaming at traitor Wormtail, but that was only Bellatrix, who had more information that the rest of them, and would not have shared it before being incarcerated, so the ones on the outside don't know. Anyway, they wouldn't seek him in a foreign country any more than Sirius and Remus would.

Montavilla wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186441>:

<< Which is exactly the kind of double-think that's common in action-adventure films. When the villain kills people, it's evil, it's murder, and he'll eventually go to hell. When the hero kills the villain (and dozen henchmen before that), it's simply justice. If JKR is trying to subvert the genre, then she needs to do a better job of letting us know that. Otherwise, we'll just assume she's following it. >>

And Pippin replied to Montavilla in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186446>:

<< She's told us that she's not following it, and doesn't particularly care for it. The work bears that out, IMO. I don't think she's subverting the genre. She's re-inventing it to serve her purposes, one of which is to show us that the genre, the consensus fantasy universe, is just wrong about some things. >>

Is the genre that needs subverting Fantasy (as in the Rowling quote), or is it Action-Adventure?

Carol wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186462>:

<< "Crucio" *means* "I torture" and "Cruciatus" is a real Latin word meaning "torture" or "torment." The successful caster *must* want his victim to suffer unendurable agony, as Bellatrix knows well and as the name itself should be sufficient to inform us. (Even if we don't know Latin, we should see the etymological connection with "excruciating.") >>

How are these words connected with 'crux' meaning 'cross'? Are all the words meaning torture (except 'torture' itself, which comes from 'twist') derived from cruxification? Was the cross named 'instrument of torture' and then the + T X shape was named after the instrument of torture?

jkoney wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186466>:

<< Now looking at it after the fact as an uninvolved spectator people can say that if he was really good he would have stunned him and forgiven him for his actions. That would have been a plastic hero. Someone everyone would have complained about for being too perfect. >>

And Magpie replied in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186471>:

<< You think a hero is plastic or unbelievable and "too perfect" because he doesn't react to somebody spitting at his teacher by using the torture curse? I don't believe for one second that anybody would have read a scene where Harry used one of the dozens of spells more about disabling or knocking Carrow out and said it was the least bit unbelievable, or that it made Harry too perfect. >>

No one is asking Harry to have forgiven Amycus -- now, THAT would have started a debate about whether he was being a saint or was abetting a crime by condoning the criminal!

Some people, even McGonagall, are asking Harry to restrain Amycus with a more effective spell (personally, I like Petrifics Totalus) while preserving his anger and even hatred against Amycus.





From catlady at wicca.net  Sat May  9 20:13:36 2009
From: catlady at wicca.net (Catlady (Rita Prince Winston))
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 20:13:36 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gu04oo+7q88@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu4o5g+ejo9@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186520

Betsy Hp posted in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186492>:

Betsy! Unfortunately I have no reply to your post, but I am so glad to see you posting. Btw I thought of your post about the sword in the pond when Carol suggested that a Freudian critic could have fun with Hermione using a phallic fang to destroy a kteic cup.




From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Sat May  9 20:33:23 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 20:33:23 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu2oau+h678@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu4paj+f28p@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186521

> > jkoney:
> >I would also assume that through the Hogwarts grapevine that he would have heard that Sirius Black left his home and moved in with James and family. In a community as small as the wizarding world (and his feelings for Lily) I would also guess that he knew that he was the best man at the wedding.
> > 
> > Given that Snape is intelligent I would think that he would wonder how Sirius a "reckless Gryffindor" could turn his back on his family.
> 
> Zara:
> Because as you say yourself, he had done it before.

Steve replies:

As Sirius was the best man at James and Lily's wedding, and was a friend for  many years, there was no real motive for betraying James.  Also, where was there any proof or even an indication that Sirius was in league w/ DE's or LV? So I agree w/ Jim that Sirius wouldn't not turn his back on James, who considered James as an extended family. Sirius had no obvious motive to betray the trust bestowed upon him w/ being their secret keeper.
> 
> > jkoney:
> > Given his relationship with Dumbledore I would think that he knew that Sirius was put in prison without a trial. Which means that no one tested his wand to see if he cast the curses to kill the muggles and Peter.
> 
> Zara:
> You do not mention that Snape had excellent reason to believe Sirius was the Secret Keeper, also from his closeness to Albus. There was incontrovertible evidence that the secret was betrayed.
> 
> I find it reasonable that no one investigated further. All the most likley principals (ALbus, Severus, Remus) had good reasons not to doubt Sirius's apparent guilt.
>
Steve replies:

What incontrovertible evidence was there that the secret was betrayed? What proof was provided by DD that Sirius was the secret keeper at the time of James and Lily's death.  All DD could give testimony to was that Sirius was at one time their secret keeper,  not that he was the secret keeper at the exact time LV attacked their home.  Sirius was not interrogated under veritas serum was he? Sirius's wand was never proven to be the wand that actually did the destruction that killed all those muggles. Snape, who flunks students for missing one little ingredient in a potion is basing an awful lot on circumstantial evidence isn't he? I certainly don't consider the case against Sirius as being "incontrovertible".





From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Sat May  9 20:50:51 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 20:50:51 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu1rcm+rd35@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu4qbb+dkre@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186522

> jkoney wrote:
> > I am saying that Snape along with everyone else didn't investigate the matter and thought (not knew) that Sirius was guilty.
> > 
> > If Snape is as distraught as he is shown, I would think he would like to know for sure. He has contacts among the DE's, he could bring it up either directly or in a roundabout way to see who knew what.
> > 
> > The difference is in the degree of certainty. I may believe in UFO's based on the evidence that other people present. But if I'm driving down a country road and there's one in the middle of the road and they take me inside the ship, I would know that they exist not just believe they do.
> 
> Carol responds:
> Considering that Sirius Black apparently blew up a street, killing twelve Muggles and his supposedly innocent friend, leaving nothing but a finger and left the scene laughing like a maniac (well-known "facts" that even Stan Shunpike was familiar with) and that Dumbledore himself had testified that Black was the Secret Keeper, I see no reason why Snape would want or need to investigate further.
> 
> Nor do I think that many DEs knew the identity of Voldemort's Order spy. Bellatrix, coming to Azkaban some months after the Potters' murder, screams about "Wormtail," and perhaps the Lestrange brothers do, too (Barty Jr. more likely screams that he's innocent and quickly succumbs to the Dementors). That doesn't necessarily mean that they knew who Wormtail was, and other DEs might not even have heard the nickname "Wormtail." As Karkaroff says at his hearing, Voldemort kept the identity of many of his DEs secret. It makes sense that the real name of a spy and traitor who was also the friend of the people Voldemort was most eager to kill would be kept as secret as possible, just as Snape's role as spy for Dumbledore was known only to the Wizengamot and not to the Order (or to that busybody, Rita Skeeter, who would have publicized it to the whole WW).
> 
> At any rate, canon indicates that Snape did not know the identity of the spy despite suspecting the identity of the makers of the Marauder's Map (for "men" who knew his identity and insulted him? who else could they be?), and, for the reasons given in my first paragraph, he had no reason to investigate it further.
> 
> Just as Harry "knew" in DH that Snape had treacherously murdered Dumbledore and wanted revenge, Snape "knew" that Sirius Black had betrayed Lily Potter to her death--and wanted revenge.
> 
> Carol, who thinks that Snape and Harry had a great deal in common, as Harry must have subconsciously realized after his visit to the Pensieve in "The Prince's Tale"

Steve replies:

Harry "knew" that Snape had cast the spell that resulted in DD's death because Harry saw him do it in front of his own eyes.  He didn't know that Snape had treacherously murdered DD, he assumed that.  He didn't find out til late in DH why Snape had cast that spell.  Snape did not "know" that Sirius Black had betrayed Lily Potter to her death in the same way that Harry knew Snape had AK'd DD.  Isn't Snape going on circumstantial and other kinds of evidence, not first hand observation when he believed that Sirius had betrayed Lily? There was no obvious motive for Sirius to betray people he loved and considered a 2nd family. 

Sirius's wand was never checked to see if it was the one that had cast the spell that killed all the muggles. Sirius was never questioned under veritas serum that I recall. No proof was given that I'm aware of that Sirius was the secret keeper at the time that the Potter's were killed by LV, only that Sirius was at one time their secret keeper.So, Snape didn't actually "know" for an absolute fact that Sirius had betrayed the Potters.  Snape just assumed (as did many others) that Sirius was guilty based on certain circumstantial evidence and in the absence of another suspect (Wormtail)and any actual proof to the contrary of what "apparently" happened.

Snape is the professor of a very exact science of Potion making.  Would he assume a potion was made correctly or incorrectly w/o testing it thorougly first? He wouldn't say a potion was done wrong if he didn't in fact actually know that it was done wrong.  So I don't believe Snape "knew" at all that Sirius had betrayed Lily and James.  And Harry's subconsious knowledge wasn't revealed in canon that I was aware of.






From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sat May  9 21:05:44 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 21:05:44 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu4lv7+d3rd@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu4r78+49ob@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186523

Toni wrote:
> > Hi, look I'm getting really confused about the whole thing, Why is Harry called a Half-Blood when both parents are magic and Vol is Half-Blood, which is only natural as it was only his mother was a witch. Could some one explain this please!!!
> 
Magpie responded:
<snip> 
> Basically, in Harry's case since his mother was Muggle-born (and so has Muggle blood) he's considered a half-blood by some. <snip>
> 
> Snape, for instance, has a parent who was an actual Muggle, but blood-wise Lily and Tobias Snape were both born of Muggle parents.
> 
> Does that make sense? Harry's ancestry is known to be Pureblood on his father's side and pure muggle on his mother's side. 
> 
> -m
>
Carol adds:
Right (except that I'm unaware of any character who *doesn't* consider Harry a Half-Blood). 

A Muggle-born like Lily Potter has two Muggle parents and therefore, no magical "blood," which is why some Wizards (like Voldemort when he refers to Lily as "your Muggle mother") make no distinction between nonmagical Muggles and their magical offspring and use the absence of magical blood as an excuse for discrimination against Muggle-borns. (The absence of magical "blood" is the basis for the baseless claim in DH that Muggle-borns have somehow "stolen" magic from Wizards and Witches with magical "blood.") Even Wizards like Dumbledore who aren't prejudiced don't distinguish between a Muggle and a Muggle-born parent in determining the status of the child. Consequently, Harry, like Snape and Voldemort, is a Half-Blood because his mother had no Wizard "blood."

As I mentioned in my response to Sartoris22, it may make more sense if look at the grandparents rather than the parents. Ron has no Muggle grandparents and is therefore a Pure-Blood. Hermione has four Muggle grandparents and is therefore a Muggle-born. Harry, like Snape and Voldemort, has two Muggle grandparents and is therefore a Half-Blood. 

Carol, not sure how Harry's children will be classified since we never hear of three-quarter bloods




From danjerri at madisoncounty.net  Sat May  9 21:18:36 2009
From: danjerri at madisoncounty.net (Jerri&Dan Chase)
Date: Sat, 9 May 2009 16:18:36 -0500
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <1241860224.619.1864.m5@yahoogroups.com>
References: <1241860224.619.1864.m5@yahoogroups.com>
Message-ID: <8A16F00DA76F44999B83DCF55A2BD79C@JerriPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186524

If I had to pick one line/exchange in the HP books that I thought was the 
funniest, to me personally, it would probably be Arthur Weasley saying 
"You're talking to the man who raised Fred and George."  This is somewhere 
in HBP, I think, when Harry is telling him about how HRH had followed Draco, 
and Arthur said something like "am I going to find out where you three were 
when you couldn't be found at the WWW shop" and Harry is surprised.

I love that line because it does several things.  One of them is to remind 
both Harry and the reader that in spite of the fact that Mr. Weasley has 
often been played for laughs and his ignorance about Muggles especially 
makes him at times seem foolish to Harry, who grew up in the Muggle world, 
Arthur Weasley is still an adult wizard, and father and much more 
intelligent than Harry and the reader tend to give him credit for being.

This reminds me that throughout the books we almost always see things from 
Harry's viewpoint, and that there is often a lot going on that we don't 
think about.  Arthur Weasley's intelligence and experience as father of 7 
very intelligent, often trouble making wizard/witch kids is one of the 
things we don't think about enough at times.

While I didn't want Lupin and Tonks to die, I am very glad that Arthur 
Weasley was given a reprieve, if we can believe JKR's interviews.

Jerri 




From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Sat May  9 21:49:27 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 21:49:27 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu4r78+49ob@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu4tp7+8kda@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186525

> Magpie responded:
> <snip> 
> > Basically, in Harry's case since his mother was Muggle-born (and so has Muggle blood) he's considered a half-blood by some. <snip>
> > 
> > Snape, for instance, has a parent who was an actual Muggle, but blood-wise Lily and Tobias Snape were both born of Muggle parents.
> > 
> > Does that make sense? Harry's ancestry is known to be Pureblood on his father's side and pure muggle on his mother's side. 

> Carol adds:
> Right (except that I'm unaware of any character who *doesn't* consider Harry a Half-Blood). 

Magpie:
I was completely confused by what you said here and then went back and read what I wrote and...was completely confused by why I wrote 'by some.' Everyone considers Harry a Half Blood, you're completely right. I think in my head what I meant was that some people would consider Muggle-borns like Lily a Muggle. But I accidentally said "by some" referring to Harry being a Half-Blood.

-m




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sat May  9 23:08:49 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 23:08:49 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu4qbb+dkre@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu52e1+69d8@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186527

Carol earlier:
<snip> 
> > At any rate, canon indicates that Snape did not know the identity of the spy despite suspecting the identity of the makers of the Marauder's Map (for "men" who knew his identity and insulted him? who else could they be?), and, for the reasons given in my first paragraph, he had no reason to investigate it further.
> > 
> > Just as Harry "knew" in DH that Snape had treacherously murdered Dumbledore and wanted revenge, Snape "knew" that Sirius Black had betrayed Lily Potter to her death--and wanted revenge. <snip>
>
Steve replied:
> 
> Harry "knew" that Snape had cast the spell that resulted in DD's death because Harry saw him do it in front of his own eyes.  He didn't know that Snape had treacherously murdered DD, he assumed that.  He didn't find out til late in DH why Snape had cast that spell.  Snape did not "know" that Sirius Black had betrayed Lily Potter to her death in the same way that Harry knew Snape had AK'd DD.  Isn't Snape going on circumstantial and other kinds of evidence, not first hand observation when he believed that Sirius had betrayed Lily? There was no obvious motive for Sirius to betray people he loved and considered a 2nd family. 
> 
> Sirius's wand was never checked to see if it was the one that had cast the spell that killed all the muggles. Sirius was never questioned under veritas serum that I recall. No proof was given that I'm aware of that Sirius was the secret keeper at the time that the Potter's were killed by LV, only that Sirius was at one time their secret keeper.So, Snape didn't actually "know" for an absolute fact that Sirius had betrayed the Potters.  Snape just assumed (as did many others) that Sirius was guilty based on certain circumstantial evidence and in the absence of another suspect (Wormtail)and any actual proof to the contrary of what "apparently" happened.
> 
> Snape is the professor of a very exact science of Potion making.  Would he assume a potion was made correctly or incorrectly w/o testing it thorougly first? He wouldn't say a potion was done wrong if he didn't in fact actually know that it was done wrong.  So I don't believe Snape "knew" at all that Sirius had betrayed Lily and James.  <snip>
>
Carol responds:
I'm using "knew" (in quotation marks) as JKR (or rather, her narrator) frequently uses it, to mean what Harry (and, in this case, Snape) firmly believes to be true even though it turns out not to be. Harry also "knows" that "Moody" drinks from his own flask because he's afraid of being poisoned (that's why the real Moody drinks from his own flask, but Crouch!Moody drinks from it because it contains Polyjuice Potion). He "knows" in SS/PS that Snape is after th Philosopher's Stone. In DH, he "knows" that he'll never look into Dumbledore's eyes again. In OoP, he "knows" that Sirius Black is being tortured in the MoM. In PoA, he "knows" (just as Snape does) that Sirius Black betrayed his parents.

Now granted, Harry has more reason to believe ("know") that Snape "murdered" Dumbledore than Snape does to "know" that Black betrayed the Potters. Nevertheless, Snape's "knowledge" is not baseless. A variety of Muggles (unfortunately, now robbed of their memories of the event) testified that Black had blown up the street and killed thirteen people. Nothing was found of Pettigrew except a finger. Fudge and the Aurors believed the Muggles, who were completely fooled by Wormtail's disappearance and diversionary tactic into believing that he was dead. What else were they supposed to think? That he'd Transfigured himself into a rat? No one knew that he was an illegal Animagus. That's how he got away, literally, with murder. Snape has no reason not to believe what everyone else believes, especially given Dumbledore's testimony (which he has no reason to doubt) that Black was the Potters' Secret Keeper.

Now, granted, Snape had his own reasons for wanting to shift his own share of the responsibility for Lily Potter's death onto the betrayer of the Potters. He had, after all, asked Voldemort to spare her and Dumbledore to protect "her/them," and he's clearly devastated when those efforts fail because their Secret Keeper betrayed them. And, just as Harry finds comfort in scapegoating Snape rather than facing his share of the blame for Sirius Black's death, Snape takes comfort in blaming the hated Black, whom he truly believes tried to murder him when they were both sixteen, for his share in Lily Potter's death.

He has neither reason nor motivation to search for any other explanation. It's Sirius's supposed betrayal of Lily, not the "Prank" or SWM, that makes Snape so determined to turn in the man he thinks has been trying all year to murder Harry. (He can't possibly know that Black, who did get into Hogwarts and slash first the Fat Lady's painting and then Ron's bedcurtains, was trying to murder Ron's rat!) Not only is he too furious to listen and too determined to turn in the murderer and his werewolf accomplice to listen to "reason," the small bits of the story that he's heard are too ridiculous to believe when he himself knows the "true" story.

I do understand why some people think that *Dumbledore,* who knew Sirius Black as an Order member, should have gone to talk to Black and find out the truth. But Snape not only had no reason to investigate further, he had no means of finding out the truth. As you say, no one bothered to check Black's wand or give him Veritaserum or use Legilimency on him, so *no one* knew the truth of what had happened. No one except Sirius Black, whom Snape was not about to visit in prison and ask for the real story, and a rat named Scabbers, whom Snape had no way of knowing was an Animagus named Peter Pettigrew, believed by Snape, Dumbledore, Fudge, and everyone else in the WW to be dead.

Snape's actions and reactions in PoA, like Harry's throughout the series, are based on what he "knows" (i.e., an incomplete or inaccurate version of events that the character takes to be the whole truth). McGonagall, who taught and liked Sirius Black, also "knows" that he betrayed the Potters and killed thirteen people, just as she "knows" that Peter Pettigrew is dead. If McGonagall, who has no reason to see Black as a potential murderer or traitor, believes that he committed these crimes, why wouldn't Snape, who saw what he believes to be the murderous side of Black when they were both teenagers? Yes, he wants to believe it, but there's nothing else *to* believe since the only other person who might have killed the Muggles "died" in the explosion, with nothing left of him but a finger.

Carol, wondering just how and why Snape is supposed to investigate a seemingly open-and-shut case for which there is no evidence in favor of the accused




From sartoris22 at yahoo.com  Sat May  9 23:36:55 2009
From: sartoris22 at yahoo.com (sartoris22)
Date: Sat, 09 May 2009 23:36:55 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <gu2kpa+s49v@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu542n+pmch@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186528

Carol: 
> 
> I keep trying to figure out her secret. *Why* is this passage (any passage that makes me laugh) funny? And I can't seem to find a satisfactory answer. Maybe I'm being too analytical. :-)


sartoris22:

Although Rowling uses wordplay, I think of her humor as more American than British because it relies heavily on characters and situations. Although some britcoms rely on characterization such as Keeping Up Apperarnces and As Times Go By, wordplay seems most elemental to the form. In the britcom "Extras," Ricky Gervais comments on the wordplay in Britcoms (often sexual innuendo) when his charater gets his own sitcom. The entire show is built around either people misunderstanding each other or people saying something that has a double meaning. The best humor in The Potter books, in my opinion, 
is situational and character driven. What makes it funny is who is saying it under what circumstances. For example, Hermione isn't particularly funny, but I find it hilarious when she gets exasperated at the things Luna Lovegood says. It's funny to me because Hermione cares so much about learning that it drives her crazy when Luna offers false informtion. When Luna talks about a Wrackspurt or something and Hermione says, "Where's the evidence for that?" I find that very amusing. Or when Neville says, "I've killed Harry Potter" after Harry doesn't immediately resurface upon eating the gillyweed and diving in the lake. Neville saying that line in that situation is funny because of Neville's long suffering persona. Harry is funnier in the movies than the books. I'm hard pressed to find much Harry humor in the novels, while in the movies he says, "Thanks, Ron," when Ron chronicles some horribe thing that might happen to Harry. The line is funny because of what we know about Ron (excitable)and Harry (cool) and the potentially life threatening situation that Harry faces.















>





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 00:42:11 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 00:42:11 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <gu542n+pmch@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu57t3+q637@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186529

sartoris22 wrote:
> 
> Although Rowling uses wordplay, I think of her humor as more American than British because it relies heavily on characters and situations. <snip> The best humor in The Potter books, in my opinion, is situational and character driven. What makes it funny is who is saying it under what circumstances. For example, Hermione isn't particularly funny, but I find it hilarious when she gets exasperated at the things Luna Lovegood says. It's funny to me because Hermione cares so much about learning that it drives her crazy when Luna offers false informtion. When Luna talks about a Wrackspurt or something and Hermione says, "Where's the evidence for that?" I find that very amusing. <snip>

Carol responds:
I was thinking strictly of the books and JKR's own sense of humor (which it might be fun to contrast with Steve Kloves's on the movie list--I'm not sure that Michael Goldenberg even has a sense of humor).

Sometimes, it's visual humor that depends on the image the reader conjures up in his or her imagination (Grawp patting Hagrid on the head, for example). But you're right about some of it being situational and character driven. I remember laughing out loud when Harry, whose just been dragged out of the icy pool and saved from the Horcrux, hears a loud voice saying, "*Are*--*you*--*mental*?"

Of course, the line tells us that his rescuer is Ron, but it's a characteristically Ronnish reaction, if you know what I mean, and it's also surprising. I'm almost certain that the lines that make me laugh are those that catch me off guard.

Another moment that I found funny the first time through is the Twins, polyjuiced to look like Harry and saying together, "We're identical!" Of course, that line reads as sadly ironic once George loses his ear and becomes merely sad (like Fred's description of his own future wedding) after Fred's death.

I do think, though, that JKR's ability to find comic moments in tragic or potentially tragic moments is one of her strengths as a writer. (Another, which she doesn't use often enough, IMO, is poignant moments like Neville's mother giving him gum wrappers and Mrs. Weasley offering Fleur the tiara.)

Carol, who doesn't have access to Britcoms and is still somewhat at a loss regarding understated British humor (maybe I should look for it in Jane Austen!)





From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Sun May 10 01:55:22 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 01:55:22 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu52e1+69d8@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu5c6a+644l@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186530


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> Carol earlier:
> <snip> 
> > > At any rate, canon indicates that Snape did not know the identity of the spy despite suspecting the identity of the makers of the Marauder's Map (for "men" who knew his identity and insulted him? who else could they be?), and, for the reasons given in my first paragraph, he had no reason to investigate it further.
> > > 
> > > Just as Harry "knew" in DH that Snape had treacherously murdered Dumbledore and wanted revenge, Snape "knew" that Sirius Black had betrayed Lily Potter to her death--and wanted revenge. <snip>
> >
> Steve replied:
> > 
> > Harry "knew" that Snape had cast the spell that resulted in DD's death because Harry saw him do it in front of his own eyes.  He didn't know that Snape had treacherously murdered DD, he assumed that.  He didn't find out til late in DH why Snape had cast that spell.  Snape did not "know" that Sirius Black had betrayed Lily Potter to her death in the same way that Harry knew Snape had AK'd DD.  Isn't Snape going on circumstantial and other kinds of evidence, not first hand observation when he believed that Sirius had betrayed Lily? There was no obvious motive for Sirius to betray people he loved and considered a 2nd family. 
> > 
> > Sirius's wand was never checked to see if it was the one that had cast the spell that killed all the muggles. Sirius was never questioned under veritas serum that I recall. No proof was given that I'm aware of that Sirius was the secret keeper at the time that the Potter's were killed by LV, only that Sirius was at one time their secret keeper.So, Snape didn't actually "know" for an absolute fact that Sirius had betrayed the Potters.  Snape just assumed (as did many others) that Sirius was guilty based on certain circumstantial evidence and in the absence of another suspect (Wormtail)and any actual proof to the contrary of what "apparently" happened.
> > <snip>
> >
> Carol responds:
> I'm using "knew" (in quotation marks) as JKR (or rather, her narrator) frequently uses it, to mean what Harry (and, in this case, Snape) firmly believes to be true even though it turns out not to be. Harry also "knows" that "Moody" drinks from his own flask because he's afraid of being poisoned (that's why the real Moody drinks from his own flask, but Crouch!Moody drinks from it because it contains Polyjuice Potion). He "knows" in SS/PS that Snape is after th Philosopher's Stone. In DH, he "knows" that he'll never look into Dumbledore's eyes again. In OoP, he "knows" that Sirius Black is being tortured in the MoM. In PoA, he "knows" (just as Snape does) that Sirius Black betrayed his parents.
> 
> Now granted, Harry has more reason to believe ("know") that Snape "murdered" Dumbledore than Snape does to "know" that Black betrayed the Potters. Nevertheless, Snape's "knowledge" is not baseless. A variety of Muggles (unfortunately, now robbed of their memories of the event) testified that Black had blown up the street and killed thirteen people. Nothing was found of Pettigrew except a finger. Fudge and the Aurors believed the Muggles, who were completely fooled by Wormtail's disappearance and diversionary tactic into believing that he was dead. What else were they supposed to think? That he'd Transfigured himself into a rat? No one knew that he was an illegal Animagus. That's how he got away, literally, with murder. Snape has no reason not to believe what everyone else believes, especially given Dumbledore's testimony (which he has no reason to doubt) that Black was the Potters' Secret Keeper.
> 
> Now, granted, Snape had his own reasons for wanting to shift his own share of the responsibility for Lily Potter's death onto the betrayer of the Potters. He had, after all, asked Voldemort to spare her and Dumbledore to protect "her/them," and he's clearly devastated when those efforts fail because their Secret Keeper betrayed them. And, just as Harry finds comfort in scapegoating Snape rather than facing his share of the blame for Sirius Black's death, Snape takes comfort in blaming the hated Black, whom he truly believes tried to murder him when they were both sixteen, for his share in Lily Potter's death.
> 
> He has neither reason nor motivation to search for any other explanation. It's Sirius's supposed betrayal of Lily, not the "Prank" or SWM, that makes Snape so determined to turn in the man he thinks has been trying all year to murder Harry. (He can't possibly know that Black, who did get into Hogwarts and slash first the Fat Lady's painting and then Ron's bedcurtains, was trying to murder Ron's rat!) Not only is he too furious to listen and too determined to turn in the murderer and his werewolf accomplice to listen to "reason," the small bits of the story that he's heard are too ridiculous to believe when he himself knows the "true" story.
> 
> I do understand why some people think that *Dumbledore,* who knew Sirius Black as an Order member, should have gone to talk to Black and find out the truth. But Snape not only had no reason to investigate further, he had no means of finding out the truth. As you say, no one bothered to check Black's wand or give him Veritaserum or use Legilimency on him, so *no one* knew the truth of what had happened. No one except Sirius Black, whom Snape was not about to visit in prison and ask for the real story, and a rat named Scabbers, whom Snape had no way of knowing was an Animagus named Peter Pettigrew, believed by Snape, Dumbledore, Fudge, and everyone else in the WW to be dead.
> 
> Snape's actions and reactions in PoA, like Harry's throughout the series, are based on what he "knows" (i.e., an incomplete or inaccurate version of events that the character takes to be the whole truth). McGonagall, who taught and liked Sirius Black, also "knows" that he betrayed the Potters and killed thirteen people, just as she "knows" that Peter Pettigrew is dead. If McGonagall, who has no reason to see Black as a potential murderer or traitor, believes that he committed these crimes, why wouldn't Snape, who saw what he believes to be the murderous side of Black when they were both teenagers? Yes, he wants to believe it, but there's nothing else *to* believe since the only other person who might have killed the Muggles "died" in the explosion, with nothing left of him but a finger.
> 
> Carol, wondering just how and why Snape is supposed to investigate a seemingly open-and-shut case for which there is no evidence in favor of the accused
>
Steve replies:

Lack of motive is the key issue here. Sirius had no motive for having done what he apparently did. Snape had no motive to investigate because he believes the seemingly open and shut case against Sirius. Snape also doesn't have a personal motive to pursue the matter further, as Sirius isn't someone he's particularly fond of. Thinking of Sirius as being guilty is IMO fairly easy for Snape. If Lily was accused of something that she had no motive to do and there was a seemingly open and shut case against her, I'd be willing to bet Snape would consider her lack of motive more seriously. Plus, of course he would desperately want her to be innocent and would investigate for personal reasons as well.

Throughout the books the real motives vs the perceived motives of characters are major plot devices by JKR. To name a few: Snape's motives for protecting Harry. Snape's motives for AK'ing DD. Sirius's motives for betraying the Potters and killing over a dozen bystanders. Marietta's motives for doing what she did. Ron's motives for leaving Harry and Hermione. HRH's motives for going off on their own and not going to Hogwarts. DD's motives for doing anything. There are several more I'm sure.

So, Snape doesn't know with absolute certainty that Sirius is guilty. But he also doesn't know what posibly could have been a motive for Sirius doing what he supposedly did. If it was someone Snape cared for, maybe that would have been enough of an excuse to investigate further. Maybe not.

Steve, who believes character's motives are important considerations, but knows authors sometimes manipulate those motives to push their plots in certain directions.




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 02:17:41 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 02:17:41 -0000
Subject: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal WAS: Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu29eh+4rt7@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu5dg5+e2t3@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186531

jkoney:
<SNIP>
I'm saying he could have investigated further. I think it's safe to say he was
feeling depressed after the Potter's were killed. I would think that he would
keep going over the facts as he knows them. <SNIP>

If I was that devoted to Lilly, I would want to make sure. <SNIP>I realize that this didn't happen in canon. But someone upthread asked something
like why I thought Snape would be mad at himself when he found out that Sirius
was innocent. I would guess that the Snape in canon, after he found out, did
think about the facts that he thought he knew and realized that they didn't all
fit together.

(I hope this also clears up Alla's questions for me).


Alla:

Ah. You are saying that he should have investigated for the sake of making sure that **true** murderer would have been behind the bars, no matter who that is, right?

And that he should have investigated for the reasons that have more to do with the memory of Lily and not much to do with Sirius?

Sure, I can see that. I guess the only thing I can say is that I can see how hatred could have blinded him of all reason and that he convinced himself that Sirius was guilty without questions.

Carol:
<HUGE SNIP>
It's
Sirius's supposed betrayal of Lily, not the "Prank" or SWM, that makes Snape so
determined to turn in the man he thinks has been trying all year to murder
Harry.
<EVEN LARGER SNIP>

Alla:

I disagree with interpretation being written as if it is a fact. I am sure Sirius' alleged betrayal of Lily played a role, but I do not remember any canon stating that Prank played no role in Snape's hatred and desire to see Sirius' to become dementors' food and plenty of canon stating an opposite. 

Zara:
<SNIP>
I find it reasonable that no one investigated further. All the most likely
principals (ALbus, Severus, Remus) had good reasons not to doubt Sirius's
apparent guilt.

Alla:

This is presupposes that everybody listed will place just as much attention on the Prank. And while as I stated upthread I totally agree that Snape had no reasons to investigate further (until he took it upon himself to become Sirius' judge, jury and executioner), I disagree about Albus completely and somewhat disagree about Remus.

Albus took Sirius in the Order **way** after Prank occurred. To me that mean that what occurred was not so serious to him that it meant that Sirius would be easy to crack under pressure and betray his best friends at war. And after taking Sirius in the Order, I think he had a responsibility to him. No, not to be his family member or anything, but judging on him making so many steps condemning Sirius further AND interfering with Potters' desire to see him as Harry's guardian, I think he could have had one little conversation with Sirius. He could have gone in place of Hagrid. 

Especially since all it took to exonerate Sirius in Albus' eyes is one little conversation.

As to Remus, well, sure he had more than enough reason to tell Sirius to go jump in the lake and forget that they ever knew each other if you ask me, way more reasons than Snape did, again in my opinion.

HOWEVER, however, I have not noticed deep seated resentment towards Sirius' in Remus who supposedly forgave him fast. Now before you say it, I totally understand that Remus really wanted to have friends while he was still in school, but to me if he had that seated resentment, I would think that he would have cut off ties with Sirius after school and I do not think he did so.

Moreover, while I agree that Remus not telling Dumbledore about tunnels could be interpreted as cowardice that he betrayed Dumbledore's trust and Remus even says so, I also think that he had doubts as to Sirius' guilt and that could be hinted as such that he at least did not want Sirius' dead or back to Azkaban.

When he talks to Harry about Dementors and Harry talks about Sirius deserving it, I think Remus replies to the effect do you think that anybody deserves it.

And of course seeing Peter on the map makes Remus run to Sirius' aid and embracing him like a brother. If Remus thought Sirius' capable of doing what he did, I would think it took a little longer for him to be convinced and certainly not embracing him as a brother.

JMO,

Alla





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 02:58:06 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 02:58:06 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu5c6a+644l@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu5fru+r876@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186532



Steve wrote:
> 
> Lack of motive is the key issue here. Sirius had no motive for having done what he apparently did. Snape had no motive to investigate because he believes the seemingly open and shut case against Sirius.

Carol responds:

Yes. Exactly--at least with regard to Snape. Snape has no motive to investigate a case that seems to be open and shut. He believes what everyone else believes. I thought you were arguing that Snape, being an intelligent man, would question Sirius Black's guilt. I'm saying that he has no reason to do that, and every reason (the evidence against Black; the apparent murder of Pettigrew of the real culprit; Dumbledore's testimony; his own experience (the so-called Prank); and his own inclinations not to do so. Granted, Black has no motive that Snape knows about, but everything else points to Black's guilt, which even Dumbledore and McGonagall believed in.

Steve:
>  Snape also doesn't have a personal motive to pursue the matter further, as Sirius isn't someone he's particularly fond of. Thinking of Sirius as being guilty is IMO fairly easy for Snape. If Lily was accused of something that she had no motive to do and there was a seemingly open and shut case against her, I'd be willing to bet Snape would consider her lack of motive more seriously. 

Carol:
Well, yes, but we're not talking about Lily. We're talking about Black, whose guilt he's quite happy to accept and not about to question. And why should he when no one else does, especially when he believes that Black tried to murder *him* when they were sixteen, using his dear friend Remus Lupin as the murder weapon? If *Dumbledore* had believed Black to be innocent, Snape might have had second thoughts about it, but with Pettigrew "dead," there really seems to be no question in *anybody's* mind, even those who liked Black as a boy, that he did it.

Steve: 
> Throughout the books the real motives vs the perceived motives of characters are major plot devices by JKR. To name a few: Snape's motives for protecting Harry. Snape's motives for AK'ing DD. Sirius's motives for betraying the Potters and killing over a dozen bystanders. Marietta's motives for doing what she did. Ron's motives for leaving Harry and Hermione. HRH's motives for going off on their own and not going to Hogwarts. DD's motives for doing anything. There are several more I'm sure.

Carol:
Exactly. That's what I'm talking about (sort of) when I say that the characters often "know" (in their own view) what's going on when in fact what they "know" is sometimes partly true and sometimes not true at all. It's the mystery story element, JKR concealing what really happened (or a character's true motives) till the end of a particular book or the end of the series. Harry and Snape both "know" that Black betrayed the Potters but find out at different times that they're wrong. Harry "know" that Snape "murdered" Dumbledore--only he didn't; it was a coup de grace on DD's orders.

But I don't see how any of this relates to the idea that I was arguing against, which is that Snape should have known that Black wasn't guilty and should have investigated. Just because he's both intelligent and curious (or was as a boy) doesn't mean that he has a motive for trying to find the real traitor and murderer. He "knows" who it is. Only, like everyone else in the WW, he's wrong.

Steve: 
> So, Snape doesn't know with absolute certainty that Sirius is guilty. But he also doesn't know what posibly could have been a motive for Sirius doing what he supposedly did. If it was someone Snape cared for, maybe that would have been enough of an excuse to investigate further. Maybe not.

Carol:
Except that Snape *is* absolutely certain that Black is guilty. And when you're absolutely certain of something, you don't investigate it. Especially since there's nothing to investigate. The only witnesses have had their memories Obliviated and the only piece of evidence, Pettigrew's finger, is in his mother's possession. Only two people know the truth. One is paying for his "crime" in Azkaban (until he escapes to commit the murder he was arrested for); the other is "dead." Just why Snape would want to question the man he thinks is out to kill Harry is unclear. And certainly, he's not going to question Ron's rat, who, to Snape as to Ron, if just the Weasleys' pet rat.

Steve: 
> Steve, who believes character's motives are important considerations, but knows authors sometimes manipulate those motives to push their plots in certain directions.

CarorL:
I agree completely, and I agree that JKR conceals a number of characters' motives, particularly Snape's, through incomplete information and misdirection. But I don't see any connection between that tactic and Snape's failure to investigate Black's guilt. Snape, in this instance, is in exactly the same position as Harry and therefore the reader until Harry learns the truth--along with the reader. Snape, who overhears only part of Lupin's story and believes none of it because unlike HRH, he doesn't see Pettigrew transform and then escape--remains in the same position as the rest of the WW, continuing to believe Black guilty until he actually sees him transform from a dog to a man in GoF.

So, of course motives are important. And, of course, JKR conceals those motives from us on many occasions. But that's not the point here. It's that the characters themselves often mistake other character's motives (and other "facts" as well), basing their actions on insufficient information. And that's what Snape is doing in PoA. He thinks he's rescuing Harry from a murderer and his werewolf accomplice and that Harry ought to be grateful. He's wrong, but we only find that out after Snape is knocked unconscious. *He* never sees the evidence that proves Lupin's and Black's unlikely tale, the transformation of Scabbers into Peter Pettigrew, complete with Pettigrew's confession and escape.

If only Lupin had kept his mouth shut and not called Snape a fool, blaming Snape's fury on a schoolboy prank, Snape might have heard the rest of the story. But, convinced as he was that he "knew" the truth, he might not have listened even then. He believed that he and the kids were in the presence of two very dangerous men and he acted accordingly. (In a way, of course, he was right. The transformed Lupin, who had indeed forgotten his potion, really was extremely dangerous. And so, in his petty way, was the real murderer, Pettigrew, whose presence Snape was not even aware of.)

Carol, who actually agrees with most of Steve's argument but doesn't quite see how it relates to what Snape "knew" in the sense that the unreliable narrator uses that word




From horridporrid03 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 03:30:26 2009
From: horridporrid03 at yahoo.com (horridporrid03)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 03:30:26 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gu1i7m+55oh@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu5hoi+lsh5@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186533

> >>Betsy Hp:
>> Honestly, that the books don't obligate readers to go back and re-examine things like that is a reason I'm so squirmy about them.  

> >>Pippin:
> The books  force you to re-read in order to understand the plot twists. 
> If you're at all into the books,  even vaguely curious, you're going to go back to see if you should have spotted any clues that Fake!Moody was a DE -- and whoa! there he is, torturing people. Do we really need Harry to say, wow, I should have known then? If he did, we wouldn't have to go back and look for the clues, and that wouldn't be nearly so much fun.
><snip>

Betsy Hp:
Going back to the post that inspired this one, as Montavilla47 pointed out, not every reader is going to enjoy going back for a reread.  I think JKR would have been asking too much of her young readers if she expected them to do as much.  So I think it was a bad writing choice if that was indeed her intention.

But as far as Harry not re-examining so that I'd be forced to, I'm not made squirmy about it on *my* account.  It's Harry that I'm bothered about.  Yes, I *do* expect him to have a "wow I should have known" moment.  Because he gleefully watched an adult mistreat a schoolboy.  Sure he had his reasons at the time, and they may have well been valid (sometimes it's nice to watch people you dislike get smeared).  But learning that it was a DE he'd watched?  That should have caused some sort of reaction. (It certainly caused a reaction in me. *g*)

> >>Pippin:
> The point of right vs easy is that moral awareness can take  effort even from people who are instinctively generous and protective. Just because Harry's instincts are admirable most of the time doesn't mean that they're admirable all the time. IMO, JKR wants to make us realize that it's the same for us as readers. Usually we know right away when our heroes are doing the right thing and when they're not. But not always. 

Betsy Hp:
But I *did* pick up on this.  It was kind of red-banner as far as I was concerned. That's what makes me squirmy.  Not that Harry missed small things, he missed *massive* things.  At least as per me.  *I* thought about the implications of Neville being alone in the classroom with the man who tortured his parents to madness at a time when he was emotionally vulnerable.  I thought about it, and thought about it, and the books never dealt with it at all.  In fact they go the opposite way and have one of Neville's classmates praise that DE in front of him.

> >>Pippin:
> IMO, JKR's goal isn't to make us want to be moral. She thinks (as a liberal must) that most of us want to be moral already. She wants to show us that moral awareness can be tougher than we think. Since she doesn't want to preach, she leaves it up to us to decide whether it's worth the effort.
> <snip>

Betsy Hp:
I don't share your opinion about JKR's goals.  What I get from the books is that there are good people and bad people and that's that.   (Frankly, the books don't strike me as all that moral.  I think there's a missing strain of goodness within them and that they're too heavily revenge oriented. But that's strictly my opinion.)

I will say, I don't recall Harry ever struggling with his own moral awareness.  *That's* what I was missing.  There was such a good opportunity if he'd re-thought what Crouch, Jr. did to Draco, but he didn't.  And that's because JKR chose not to write it.  Which means she wasn't inviting the reader to re-think it with him.  When I re-thought it I felt I was working against the book, not hand in hand with it.

> >>Pippin:
> The WW may take centuries to work out that it was wrong to enslave the Elves, just as our culture took centuries to work out that it was wrong to enslave other humans.
> <snip>

Betsy Hp:
Totally off-topic here, but... One more example of the vast superiority of the Muggle world over the Wizard!  We figured it out *ages* ago, and the Wizards haven't even gotten to first base!  (Maybe they need more Quakers? *tongue firmly in cheek*)


> >>Pippin:
> Snape made it very plain with his disgusting pictures in HBP.
> This is what you're fighting, he says  -- the things that enslave and torture and kill. And I was shocked to re-read that, because I too had believed the Dark Arts were poorly defined in canon. But they're really not. It's just that the definition doesn't fit into our familiar little fictional mythology of good guys and bad guys.

Betsy Hp:
Doesn't it?  "Don't support that which enslaves, tortures or kills" sounds pretty familiar to me. :)  (I'm rewatching "Batman Begins" as I type. A moment when Bruce separates himself from the villain?  When he makes clear, "I'm not an executioner."  \o/ Long live Batman!)

> >>Pippin:
> I was expecting a definition of what the bad guys do and the good guys don't. But that's not it. They are something that people have to fight, period. As Snape tells Draco, it's childish to think that you won't have to fight them if you're on their side. And, as the books demonstrate, it's also childish to think that you'll be prevented from using them if you're not on their side.
> <snip>

Betsy Hp:
You won't be prevented and, if you're a good guy, you don't have to re-think it if you *do* use it. Which yes, doesn't fit in with my "little fictional mythology of good guys and bad guys".  Again, it's why I'm squirmy about these books.  (I'm old-fashioned in that I see the "mythology of good guys and bad guys" as neither "little" nor strictly "fictional".  There's a lot that's foundational and instructive to real-life issues in those sort of mythologies.  It's why they're still told, I think.)

> >>Pippin:
> What I see is  sinful people who think it's worth the effort to try to be virtuous, to try to stop people from hurting each other,  against sinful people who think it isn't. 

Betsy Hp:
But Pippin, that's my whole point.  Harry didn't try and stop Fake!Moody from hurting Draco.  On the contrary, he enjoyed the show.  And even after learning that it was actually a particularly sadistic DeathEater doing the hurting, he didn't re-think that fact that he enjoyed seeing that sadism in action.  It obviously wasn't worth the effort.

> >>Pippin:
> Are you saying it was authorial sloppiness that Fake!Moody was an effective teacher?  Didn't Mussolini made the trains run on time? Do  horrible people have to be shown as horrible at everything they do? 

Betsy Hp:
I'd like to think that if I were standing next to Simon Wiesenthal I wouldn't praise Hitler's building of the Autobahn.  So yeah, I'd prefer to think JKR was merely sloppy there.  (And I honestly do think the moral issues I have with the series have more to do with JKR not thinking some things through rather than personal moral flaws on her part.)

Betsy Hp




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 03:49:53 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 03:49:53 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <gu5hoi+lsh5@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu5it1+40jp@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186534

Betsy Hp:
<SNIP>
But as far as Harry not re-examining so that I'd be forced to, I'm not made
squirmy about it on *my* account. It's Harry that I'm bothered about. Yes, I
*do* expect him to have a "wow I should have known" moment. Because he
gleefully watched an adult mistreat a schoolboy. Sure he had his reasons at the
time, and they may have well been valid (sometimes it's nice to watch people you
dislike get smeared). But learning that it was a DE he'd watched? That should
have caused some sort of reaction. (It certainly caused a reaction in me. *g*) <SNIP>

Alla:
It is really you! Squeeee.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R

Being careful knowing that you are likely to read this book.


As I mentioned elsewhere I am reading Corambis right now, and Sarah Monette seems to provide in spades the reexamination you seem to be looking for. Only that makes me feel as if author considers **me** the reader to be an absolute idiot and incapable of making up my own mind as to what I believe to be character's motivations for doing things and how he is changing or not. I do not think it is  much of a spoiler to say that through out the book one of our protagonists goes back thinking to **all bad things or not so bad things** he had done through other three books , well, how should I put it? Many many many times. As I also mentioned elsewhere, I want to beat him with a stick. I much prefer to imagine that Harry, as much as he can be a thinker, rethought what was important because he gave up Elder wand, rather than hear him saying "I am a monster" like Felix does over and over again. Just my opinion of course.


>>Pippin:
<SNIP>
> Are you saying it was authorial sloppiness that Fake!Moody was an effective
teacher? Didn't Mussolini made the trains run on time? Do horrible people have
to be shown as horrible at everything they do?

Betsy Hp:
<SNIP>
I'd like to think that if I were standing next to Simon Wiesenthal I wouldn't
praise Hitler's building of the Autobahn. So yeah, I'd prefer to think JKR was
merely sloppy there. (And I honestly do think the moral issues I have with the
series have more to do with JKR not thinking some things through rather than
personal moral flaws on her part.)

Alla:

I agree with Pippin, I do not think it is sloppiness at all. In Tigana, Erlein whom our main good guy enslaved, literally, because he needed Erlein's help to free the country from tyrants, lets good guys have it in the best traditions of Snape. Only to me Erlein seems to have much more reason to do that and one of the things he says is that the roads are now much safer when the tyrants are in charge basically rather when native duke was in charge. And you know, he is right.  Roads **are** safer, and tyrants are still tyrants and need to be dealt with.

JMO,

Alla






From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Sun May 10 14:27:22 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 14:27:22 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu5fru+r876@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu6o8a+94ui@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186536


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> 
> Steve wrote:
> > 
> > Lack of motive is the key issue here. Sirius had no motive for having done what he apparently did. Snape had no motive to investigate because he believes the seemingly open and shut case against Sirius.
> 
> Carol responds:
> 
> Yes. Exactly--at least with regard to Snape. Snape has no motive to investigate a case that seems to be open and shut. He believes what everyone else believes. I thought you were arguing that Snape, being an intelligent man, would question Sirius Black's guilt. I'm saying that he has no reason to do that, and every reason (the evidence against Black; the apparent murder of Pettigrew of the real culprit; Dumbledore's testimony; his own experience (the so-called Prank); and his own inclinations not to do so. Granted, Black has no motive that Snape knows about, but everything else points to Black's guilt, which even Dumbledore and McGonagall believed in.
> 
> Steve:
> >  Snape also doesn't have a personal motive to pursue the matter further, as Sirius isn't someone he's particularly fond of. Thinking of Sirius as being guilty is IMO fairly easy for Snape. If Lily was accused of something that she had no motive to do and there was a seemingly open and shut case against her, I'd be willing to bet Snape would consider her lack of motive more seriously. 
> 
> Carol:
> Well, yes, but we're not talking about Lily. We're talking about Black, whose guilt he's quite happy to accept and not about to question. And why should he when no one else does, especially when he believes that Black tried to murder *him* when they were sixteen, using his dear friend Remus Lupin as the murder weapon? If *Dumbledore* had believed Black to be innocent, Snape might have had second thoughts about it, but with Pettigrew "dead," there really seems to be no question in *anybody's* mind, even those who liked Black as a boy, that he did it.
> 
> Steve: 
> > Throughout the books the real motives vs the perceived motives of characters are major plot devices by JKR. To name a few: Snape's motives for protecting Harry. Snape's motives for AK'ing DD. Sirius's motives for betraying the Potters and killing over a dozen bystanders. Marietta's motives for doing what she did. Ron's motives for leaving Harry and Hermione. HRH's motives for going off on their own and not going to Hogwarts. DD's motives for doing anything. There are several more I'm sure.
> 
> Carol:
> Exactly. That's what I'm talking about (sort of) when I say that the characters often "know" (in their own view) what's going on when in fact what they "know" is sometimes partly true and sometimes not true at all. It's the mystery story element, JKR concealing what really happened (or a character's true motives) till the end of a particular book or the end of the series. Harry and Snape both "know" that Black betrayed the Potters but find out at different times that they're wrong. Harry "know" that Snape "murdered" Dumbledore--only he didn't; it was a coup de grace on DD's orders.
> 
> But I don't see how any of this relates to the idea that I was arguing against, which is that Snape should have known that Black wasn't guilty and should have investigated. Just because he's both intelligent and curious (or was as a boy) doesn't mean that he has a motive for trying to find the real traitor and murderer. He "knows" who it is. Only, like everyone else in the WW, he's wrong.
> 
> Steve: 
> > So, Snape doesn't know with absolute certainty that Sirius is guilty. But he also doesn't know what posibly could have been a motive for Sirius doing what he supposedly did. If it was someone Snape cared for, maybe that would have been enough of an excuse to investigate further. Maybe not.
> 
> Carol:
> Except that Snape *is* absolutely certain that Black is guilty. And when you're absolutely certain of something, you don't investigate it. Especially since there's nothing to investigate. The only witnesses have had their memories Obliviated and the only piece of evidence, Pettigrew's finger, is in his mother's possession. Only two people know the truth. One is paying for his "crime" in Azkaban (until he escapes to commit the murder he was arrested for); the other is "dead." Just why Snape would want to question the man he thinks is out to kill Harry is unclear. And certainly, he's not going to question Ron's rat, who, to Snape as to Ron, if just the Weasleys' pet rat.
> 
> Steve: 
> > Steve, who believes character's motives are important considerations, but knows authors sometimes manipulate those motives to push their plots in certain directions.
> 
> CarorL:
> I agree completely, and I agree that JKR conceals a number of characters' motives, particularly Snape's, through incomplete information and misdirection. But I don't see any connection between that tactic and Snape's failure to investigate Black's guilt. Snape, in this instance, is in exactly the same position as Harry and therefore the reader until Harry learns the truth--along with the reader. Snape, who overhears only part of Lupin's story and believes none of it because unlike HRH, he doesn't see Pettigrew transform and then escape--remains in the same position as the rest of the WW, continuing to believe Black guilty until he actually sees him transform from a dog to a man in GoF.
> 
> So, of course motives are important. And, of course, JKR conceals those motives from us on many occasions. But that's not the point here. It's that the characters themselves often mistake other character's motives (and other "facts" as well), basing their actions on insufficient information. And that's what Snape is doing in PoA. He thinks he's rescuing Harry from a murderer and his werewolf accomplice and that Harry ought to be grateful. He's wrong, but we only find that out after Snape is knocked unconscious. *He* never sees the evidence that proves Lupin's and Black's unlikely tale, the transformation of Scabbers into Peter Pettigrew, complete with Pettigrew's confession and escape.
> 
> If only Lupin had kept his mouth shut and not called Snape a fool, blaming Snape's fury on a schoolboy prank, Snape might have heard the rest of the story. But, convinced as he was that he "knew" the truth, he might not have listened even then. He believed that he and the kids were in the presence of two very dangerous men and he acted accordingly. (In a way, of course, he was right. The transformed Lupin, who had indeed forgotten his potion, really was extremely dangerous. And so, in his petty way, was the real murderer, Pettigrew, whose presence Snape was not even aware of.)
> 
> Carol, who actually agrees with most of Steve's argument but doesn't quite see how it relates to what Snape "knew" in the sense that the unreliable narrator uses that word
>
Steve replies:

I don't think it relates very well to that specific sense of "knew" that you are referring to, at least as I understand what you mean. And although we've been primarily talking about Snape's belief in Sirius betraying the Potters and killing all those muggles, and not about Snape basing his actions in PoA on his POV based on what he "knew" at the time, it was an interesting diversion that did fill in valuable info on Snape's attitude and feelings towards Sirius. (As was my comments about what if Lily had been accused of such a crime being an example of a situation where Snape's attitude and feelings toward a person being a motive sufficient to having him go beyond what what obvious to search for what was truth. It's fine to accept what is commonly believed to be true if it's someone you don't know or strongly dislike.  It's another thing entirely that motivates you if it involves someone you love dearly). 

Although, on one point, perhaps, the lack of one piece of information Snape had from any pov, narrative or otherwise. may have been significant if Snape had been so inclined to consider it.  The info Snape has in the book from the unreliable narrator is that DD testified that Sirius was the Potter's secret keeper. If all that was reported (in the Daily Prophet perhaps?) was that DD verified that Sirius was at one time secret keeper, an entirely valid question is "Was he the secret keeper for sure at the time of LV's attack on the Potters?".  Perhaps I'm the only one curious about this, having watched a ton of tv shows where those kinds of questions are always asked by defense attorneys like Perry Mason.

As Wormtail was the secret keeper at that time, and as Wormtail is supposedly dead, another common assumption is that Sirius must have still been the secret keeper. It's not a question that would have been asked by anyone other than Sirius's defense lawyer, which unfortunately wasn't available to him. If such an advocate would asked: "Professor Dumbledore, are you absolutely certain that Sirius Black was still the Potter's secret keeper at the time of their attack?", then DD would have had to say "no".  But this didn't happen, so, yes, as you've mentioned, Snape doesn't really have a logical reason to ask it either, due to the other evidence logically indicating if not actually proving Sirius's guilt.

Steve, wondering what Sirius's trial would have been like if DD had been his defense lawyer.




From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Sun May 10 15:18:11 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 15:18:11 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <gu57t3+q637@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu6r7j+9a7v@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186537

> sartoris22 wrote:
> > 
> > Although Rowling uses wordplay, I think of her humor as more American than British because it relies heavily on characters and situations. <snip> The best humor in The Potter books, in my opinion, is situational and character driven. What makes it funny is who is saying it under what circumstances. For example, Hermione isn't particularly funny, but I find it hilarious when she gets exasperated at the things Luna Lovegood says. It's funny to me because Hermione cares so much about learning that it drives her crazy when Luna offers false informtion. When Luna talks about a Wrackspurt or something and Hermione says, "Where's the evidence for that?" I find that very amusing. <snip>
> 
> Carol responds:
> I was thinking strictly of the books and JKR's own sense of humor (which it might be fun to contrast with Steve Kloves's on the movie list--I'm not sure that Michael Goldenberg even has a sense of humor).
> 
> Sometimes, it's visual humor that depends on the image the reader conjures up in his or her imagination (Grawp patting Hagrid on the head, for example). But you're right about some of it being situational and character driven. I remember laughing out loud when Harry, whose just been dragged out of the icy pool and saved from the Horcrux, hears a loud voice saying, "*Are*--*you*--*mental*?"
> 
> Of course, the line tells us that his rescuer is Ron, but it's a characteristically Ronnish reaction, if you know what I mean, and it's also surprising. I'm almost certain that the lines that make me laugh are those that catch me off guard.
> 
> Another moment that I found funny the first time through is the Twins, polyjuiced to look like Harry and saying together, "We're identical!" Of course, that line reads as sadly ironic once George loses his ear and becomes merely sad (like Fred's description of his own future wedding) after Fred's death.
> 
> I do think, though, that JKR's ability to find comic moments in tragic or potentially tragic moments is one of her strengths as a writer. (Another, which she doesn't use often enough, IMO, is poignant moments like Neville's mother giving him gum wrappers and Mrs. Weasley offering Fleur the tiara.)
> 
> Carol, who doesn't have access to Britcoms and is still somewhat at a loss regarding understated British humor (maybe I should look for it in Jane Austen!)
>
Steve replies:

I found a lot of things funny in the Harry Potter books. Ron and the twins for example are hilarious.  Some of what they said and did offended some, but not me, I loved it all. Luna was my absolute favorite, as was everyone's responses to what she would say and do.

And for me at least, certain characters were simply comical on their own merits, w/o saying anything funny.  Crabbe and Goyle crack me up just standing behind Malfoy like grouchy gargoyles waiting to pounce.  Hagrid trying to squeeze through the doorway at the Burrough. Umbridge being carried off by the centaurs. Students in the common room puking up stuff as part of the twins experiments next to other students studying as if nothing strange is happening next to them. Kreacher hitting Mundungus w/ a frying pan. Ginny's favorite spell being bat boogies.  Gnomes being thrown out of the garden.

There's a lot of tension at times in the novels. Humor is one of the best ways to alleviate tension and give the readers a chance to relax and move forward again. JKR created many characters that were real enough to be funny at times.  Those of us who appreciate that humor enjoy the books on a level others are unable or unwilling to. 
Steve, who loves British comedies, especially Monty Python, Red Dwarf and Faulty Towers, but wishes anyone good luck in finding it in Jane Austen.




From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 16:17:50 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 16:17:50 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu6o20+j8k5@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu6une+1p51@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186539

> > Carol, who actually agrees with most of Steve's argument but doesn't quite see how it relates to what Snape "knew" in the sense that the unreliable narrator uses that word
> >
> Steve replies:
> 
> I don't think it relates very well to that specific sense of "knew" that you are referring to, at least as I understand what you mean. And although we've been primarily talking about Snape's belief in Sirius betraying the Potters and killing all those muggles, and not about Snape basing his actions in PoA on his POV based on what he "knew" at the time, it was an interesting diversion that did fill in valuable info on Snape's attitude and feelings towards Sirius. (As was my comments about what if Lily had been accused of such a crime being an example of a situation where Snape's attitude and feelings toward a person being a motive sufficient to having him go beyond what what obvious to search for what was truth. It's fine to accept what is commonly believed to be true if it's someone you don't know or strongly dislike.  It's another thing entirely that motivates you if it involves someone you love dearly). 
> 
> Although, on one point, perhaps, the lack of one piece of information Snape had from any pov, narrative or otherwise. may have been significant if Snape had been so inclined to consider it.  The info Snape has in the book from the unreliable narrator is that DD testified that Sirius was the Potter's secret keeper. If all that was reported (in the Daily Prophet perhaps?) was that DD verified that Sirius was at one time secret keeper, an entirely valid question is "Was he the secret keeper for sure at the time of LV's attack on the Potters?".  Perhaps I'm the only one curious about this, having watched a ton of tv shows where those kinds of questions are always asked by defense attorneys like Perry Mason.
> 
> As Wormtail was the secret keeper at that time, and as Wormtail is supposedly dead, another common assumption is that Sirius must have still been the secret keeper. It's not a question that would have been asked by anyone other than Sirius's defense lawyer, which unfortunately wasn't available to him. If such an advocate would asked: "Professor Dumbledore, are you absolutely certain that Sirius Black was still the Potter's secret keeper at the time of their attack?", then DD would have had to say "no".  But this didn't happen, so, yes, as you've mentioned, Snape doesn't really have a logical reason to ask it either, due to the other evidence logically indicating if not actually proving Sirius's guilt.
> 
> Steve, wondering what Sirius's trial would have been like if DD had been his defense lawyer.
>

Montavilla47:

Reading this, I'm struck by that choice of "Right vs. Easy."  The
*right* thing to do would have been to have had a trial for Sirius,
or at least a proper investigation.  Instead, the wizarding world
imprisoned Sirius without allowing him to make any kind of 
plea.

Certainly it was easy for Snape to put the blame for Lily's
death on Sirius than to investigate the evidence for himself.
And, I don't think anybody thinks it was right for Snape to 
threaten Sirius with being kissed by the Dementors without
a chance to plead his case to the authorities.

(Of course, as a Snape defender, I am bound by the rules 
of the secret Snape-favoring cabal to point out that Snape's
threats were empty bluster.  When he was alone with the 
unconscious Sirius, he summoned a streacher and took
the suspected murderer to the castle, where he could be
--and was--interviewed by Dumbledore.)

Getting back to the real point, it was easy for Snape to
accept the general assumption that Sirius was an evil
murderer.  But how much easier was it for Dumbledore 
to believe what  he was told and not even to speak to Sirius 
once?

We Muggle readers are shocked, right along with Harry,
when we learn about this, because imprisonment without
trial is completely against the principles of our legal 
system (I'm speaking of the U.S., here, but it also applies
to Britain).  

The injustice of Sirius's imprisonment strikes Harry so 
strongly that he demands the release of Stan Shunpike
before he'll even consider working with the Rufus 
Scrimgeour.  I think Harry is doing mostly the right 
thing.  (As a Muggle, I'm going "Trial, Harry.  You don't
just *release* suspect Death Eaters, you give them 
a fair trial.")

It's not easy to give every defendant a trial.  It's laborious
and expensive and a lot of the time we don't get it right.
JKR does a great job with Sirius's story showing us how 
important it is to provide a process for every suspect--no
matter how sure we are that he or she is guilty.  

But, as we see when Harry has his trial, the wizarding 
world sense of justice is pretty messed up.  Although both
prosecution and one of  the judges, Fudge tries to further
influence the outcome of the trial by changing the time at
the last minute.  

On the other hand, Dumbledore arrives with a witness who 
bends the truth on the stand (she didn't see the Dementors, 
although she did know they were there).

We don't see the wizards use any kind of forensic evidence.
They don't use priori incantatem on Harry's wand and they
don't extract a memory from him.  They don't even send an
investigator to the Dursleys to ask what happened.

I think we can assume that, had Sirius had a trial, it would
have been quite similar to Harry's.  If Dumbledore believed he
was innocent, he would have been there with coached 
witnesses and the force of his personal charisma to influence
the court--which would ignore most of the evidence 
anyway.








From HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com  Sun May 10 16:58:27 2009
From: HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com (HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com)
Date: 10 May 2009 16:58:27 -0000
Subject: Weekly Chat, 5/10/2009, 1:00 pm 
Message-ID: <1241974707.650.86794.m5@yahoogroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186540

Reminder from: HPforGrownups Yahoo! Group
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From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 17:34:35 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 17:34:35 -0000
Subject: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal WAS: Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu5dg5+e2t3@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu737b+sjpi@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186541

Carol earlier:
> <HUGE SNIP>
> It's Sirius's supposed betrayal of Lily, not the "Prank" or SWM, that makes Snape so determined to turn in the man he thinks has been trying all year to murder Harry.
> <EVEN LARGER SNIP>
> 
> Alla responded:
> 
> I disagree with interpretation being written as if it is a fact. I am sure Sirius' alleged betrayal of Lily played a role, but I do not remember any canon stating that Prank played no role in Snape's hatred and desire to see Sirius' to become dementors' food and plenty of canon stating an opposite. 

Carol again:
Sorry. I meant "IMO," of course. (Twenty years of writing academic essays got me in the habit of stating the point I intend to support as a direct assertion without qualifiers like "I think" or "in my view" or "IMO." Hard habit to break.)

At any rate, you're right, of course, that it's my opinion, not a canon fact, and I didn't mean that the so-called Prank played no role at all, only that it wasn't Snape's primary motivation, IMO. (More on that later.)

However, it *is* a fact (within canon) that Snape thinks Black entered the castle to murder Harry and that Lupin has been helping him all year. That assumption (also made by Dumbledore, Fudge, Mr. Weasley, and everyone else except Sirius Black himself and Pettigrew) would naturally strengthen Snape's view that Black betrayed the Potters to their deaths. Even Lupin acknowledges that Snape is there to save Harry ("Severus, you're making a mistake. . . . Sirius is not here to kill Harry"), and Snape himself makes his purpose clear:
"I have just saved your neck. You should be thanking me on bended knee! You would have been well served if he killed you!").

Granted, Snape is not only mistaken here but uncharacteristically irrational, absolutely certain that he's right and unwilling to listen to Lupin, but Lupin makes matters worse by calling Snape a fool and blaming his behavior on a schoolboy grudge, which not only infuriates Snape more but convinces Harry (and, through him, the reader) that Snape's only motivation is the so-called Prank. 

Lupin, as we see in HBP after Snape kills Dumbledore, has no more idea that Snape loved Lily than Harry does. That his motivation in the Shrieking Shack (aside from saving Harry and his friends) would be to avenge *Lily* by returning Black to Azkaban never enters his head, or that of any of the other characters. Blaming his desire for vengeance on the "Prank" is misdirection, a partial truth masquerading as the whole truth, which neither Harry nor the reader will learn until "The Prince's Tale" and which Lupin (who also doesn't know that Snape's Sectumsempra saved his life) never learns at all.

As I said before, not only does Snape have every reason to believe that Sirius Black betrayed the Potters and no reason to think otherwise, hating him and blaming him helps Snape to bear the burden of his own guilt. Yes, Snape would think, I reported the Prophecy to Voldemort, but I went first to Voldemort and then to Dumbledore to protect Lily and promised to do "anything" if Dumbledore would protect her. But Dumbledore's efforts to protect Lily (and, of course, James and Harry) were in vain because James Potter trusted Sirius Black and made him the Secret Keeper. That, IMO, is why Snape is so furious at Black and the dead James--if it weren't for James Potter's blind trust in his friend, Lily would still be alive. (In DH, Dumbledore reinforces this belief, saying to the desperately grieving young Snape, "She {Lily] and James put their faith in the wrong person" and comparing their faith in their unworthy Secret Keeper to his own hope that Voldemort would spare Lily (DH Am. ed. 678), a comparison that Snape seems to hear only half of given his subsequent virulent hatred of the man he thinks is Lily's betrayer. In a way, he's right, but, of course, the friend that James trusted was Peter Pettigrew, not Black.

At any rate, IMO, we can only properly understand the Shrieking Shack sequence, which makes Snape look almost psychotically furious and vengeful despite the fact that he's risked his life going after a man he thinks is a murderer who intends to kill again (partly right, partly mistaken) and a werewolf who's about to transform (completely right) whom he views (wrongly) as the "murderer's" accomplice. Only when we read "The Prince's Tale" and see the torment that Snape undergoes when Lily dies and then see his Patronus can we understand what Lily meant to him. Only then can we understand that Dumbledore is right and Harry and Lupin wrong in HBP when they believe that the remorse was feigned, that Snape hated James (true) and held Lily in contempt as a "Mudblood" (false, even though he used the term in a moment of rage and humiliation that he could not take back).

That Snape would scapegoat Black as Harry later scapegoats Snape with regard to Black's death seems natural to me and seems borne out when we reread Snape's behavior in the Shrieking Shack in the light of "The Prince's Tale." Just my own opinion, of course.

So, yes, the Prank plays a part in shaping Snape's view of Black and comes back into play as the basis of their mutual antagonism in OoP (along with Black's view that Snape is an unreformed Death Eater out to sabotage Harry, yet another instance of what a character "knows" shaping his actions and reactions, in this case, intensifying Harry's distrust of Snape in the Occlumency lessons). Had the so-called Prank and SWM not occurred, Snape might not have hated Lily's "betrayer" so intensely. But Lily was everything to Snape, as we see from his Patronus and his clinging to his unrequited love for her until the moment of his death. Her loss (and his own role in it) is so unendurable that he wants to die. The only thing that keeps him from suicide, if I'm reading "The Prince's Tale" correctly, is his mission to keep Lily's death from being in vain. Much as he resents the schoolboy bullying of MWPP, especially James and Sirius, they are, as someone on this list said, "small potatoes" compared with Lily's death. And just as Lily's death motivates almost everything he does as spy and Harry's protector and subverter of Voldemort, it's surely Lily's death, not the so-called Prank, that pushes him almost to the brink of madness in the Shrieking Shack and afterward.

Carol, just expressing her own view of the way the new information in "The Prince's Tale" reshapes the reader's initial interpretation of Snape in PoA





From horridporrid03 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 17:45:55 2009
From: horridporrid03 at yahoo.com (horridporrid03)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 17:45:55 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <gu5it1+40jp@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu73sk+kber@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186542

> >>Catlady:
> Betsy! Unfortunately I have no reply to your post, but I am so glad to see you posting. Btw I thought of your post about the sword in the pond when Carol suggested that a Freudian critic could have fun with Hermione using a phallic fang to destroy a kteic cup.

Betsy Hp:
Thanks!  Fun with Freud is always awesome. :D

> >>Pippin:
> <SNIP>
>> Are you saying it was authorial sloppiness that Fake!Moody was an effective teacher? Didn't Mussolini made the trains run on time? Do horrible people have to be shown as horrible at everything they do?

> Betsy Hp:
> <SNIP>
>> I'd like to think that if I were standing next to Simon Wiesenthal I wouldn't praise Hitler's building of the Autobahn. So yeah, I'd prefer to think JKR was merely sloppy there.
>> <snip>

> >>Alla:
> <snip>
> I agree with Pippin, I do not think it is sloppiness at all. In Tigana, Erlein whom our main good guy enslaved, literally, because he needed Erlein's help to free the country from tyrants, lets good guys have it in the best traditions of Snape. Only to me Erlein seems to have much more reason to do that and one of the things he says is that the roads are now much safer when the tyrants are in charge basically rather when native duke was in charge. And you know, he is right.  Roads **are** safer, and tyrants are still tyrants and need to be dealt with.
> JMO,

Betsy Hp:
I skipped everything having to do with Corambis because I haven't read it yet. :D  So dealing just with this part: Yes, Fake!Moody was a good teacher to a certain extent.  The autobahn is pretty darn cool.  I'm *still* not going to chat with a holocaust survivor about how, sure Hitler was bad at some things but boy did he know good roads!  Strikes me as rude, and also a colossal missing of the point.

I will say, I thought it was a cool choice to have Fake!Moody be a good and charismatic teacher.  It added a nice shade of gray to what should have become a pretty dark character.  But, per Harry, he never really became all that dark.  *I* put pieces together and decided Fake!Moody was a bad sort that shouldn't have been allowed around children, but I never got the sense JKR agreed with me. Certainly Harry never thought through the implications of one of his favorite teachers of that year being a sadist.

Oh, I just had a thought: having Dean praise Fake!Moody actually makes some sense.  He's not aware of Neville's past at that point (iirc) and as a Muggle-born he's totally removed from the history of the first war and Crouch, Jr.'s part in it.  It's unfortunate though that JKR didn't give us a reaction from Neville for Harry to bounce off of.  Something to show us that Harry doesn't fully agree with Dean's ill informed sentiments. 

Betsy Hp




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 18:13:44 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 18:13:44 -0000
Subject: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu6o20+j8k5@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu75go+bl9u@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186543

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "mesmer44" <winterfell7 at ...> wrote:
>
Steve wrote:
> <snip>
> 
> Although, on one point, perhaps, the lack of one piece of information Snape had from any pov, narrative or otherwise. may have been significant if Snape had been so inclined to consider it.  The info Snape has in the book from the unreliable narrator is that DD testified that Sirius was the Potter's secret keeper. 

Carol responds:
One small clarification: the narrator isn't always unreliable. For example, it's a "fact" within canon that Dumbledore testified that Sirius Black was the Secret Keeper. (Actually, I think this bit of information comes from Dumbledore himself, not the narrator.) The narrator is only unreliable when he (she?) reports events from Harry's point of view as if they were fact. For example, "Snape was going to Crucio him into insanity" (quoted from memory) is immediately revealed as a mistaken view of reality when Snape stops the Crucio but still leaves the impression that Snape is evil. I've given other examples of things that Harry believes to be true and the narrator states as fact which turn out to be false. The narrator and the characters together often misdirect the reader, particularly with regard to Snape's motives but also in other instances. That doesn't mean that we can never trust the narrator. If the narrator says that Harry was late to Potions class, Harry was late to Potions class. But sometimes there's more to the narrator's reports than we realize--for example, the little girl whose scales Hermione repairs is not a little girl but Gregory Goyle and the Vanishing Cabinet that Harry passes in the Room of Requirement is the very Vanishing Cabinet that Draco is repairing in the Room of Requirement (and Harry is in the very room he's been trying unsuccessfully to get into). It's a very sophisticated literary device for misleading the reader and, sometimes, dropping hints or clues at the same time. (JKR should try her hand at mystery writing. She'd be excellent at it.)

Steve wrote:

If all that was reported (in the Daily Prophet perhaps?) was that DD verified that Sirius was at one time secret keeper, an entirely valid question is "Was he the secret keeper for sure at the time of LV's attack on the Potters?".  Perhaps I'm the only one curious about this, having watched a ton of tv shows where those kinds of questions are always asked by defense attorneys like Perry Mason. <snip>


Carol responds:
You're not the only one who's curious about that. All we know, very indirectly, is that James Potter rejected Dumbledore's offer to be the Secret Keeper, telling him that he intended to give that job to Sirius Black and that Black subsequently convinced him (or them, since Lily had to have been included in the decision) to give the job to Peter Pettigrew. It's unclear whether Black was ever the Secret Keeper. I tend to think that he wasn't since it would probably be hard to transfer a secret from one Keeper to another.

The time frame is inconsistent, too, since in PoA, Peter is made Secret Keeper just a week before the Potters are killed on Halloween, but in DH, the Potters are already in hiding and Peter is already behaving strangely shortly after Harry's first birthday, which means that the letter was written in early August. Harry infers, apparently wrongly, that it was the last time Lily saw "Wormy." If PoA is correct, they kept on seeing him and trusting him into October, and Black only begins to realize the truth when he goes to check on Wormtail on October 31 and finds him missing.

JKR is frustratingly inconsistent from one book to another. I still think she'd be a great mystery writer because she's so good at misdirection, but over a whole series of books, she tends to forget or misremember details (such as Draco's not having the Hand of Glory or, in this case, when Peter was made Secret Keeper). She's still not convinced that twenty-four hours are "missing" from the first chapter of SS/PS. (Why *did* McGonagall have to wait around all day for Hagrid and Dumbledore to show up? We'll probably never know.)

Carol, who wonders whether JKR's desk as shown on her website reveals a general tendency to be disorganized and to forget where she put things (such as a reference to a particular object, spell, or motif)

 





From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 18:20:24 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 18:20:24 -0000
Subject: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal WAS: Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST
In-Reply-To: <gu737b+sjpi@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu75t8+10hi1@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186544

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> Carol again:
> Sorry. I meant "IMO," of course. (Twenty years of writing academic essays got me in the habit of stating the point I intend to support as a direct assertion without qualifiers like "I think" or "in my view" or "IMO." Hard habit to break.)
> 
> At any rate, you're right, of course, that it's my opinion, not a canon fact, and I didn't mean that the so-called Prank played no role at all, only that it wasn't Snape's primary motivation, IMO. (More on that later.)
> 
> However, it *is* a fact (within canon) that Snape thinks Black entered the castle to murder Harry and that Lupin has been helping him all year. That assumption (also made by Dumbledore, Fudge, Mr. Weasley, and everyone else except Sirius Black himself and Pettigrew) would naturally strengthen Snape's view that Black betrayed the Potters to their deaths. Even Lupin acknowledges that Snape is there to save Harry ("Severus, you're making a mistake. . . . Sirius is not here to kill Harry"), and Snape himself makes his purpose clear:
> "I have just saved your neck. You should be thanking me on bended knee! You would have been well served if he killed you!").

jkoney:
Continuing the quote: "You'd have died like your father, too arrogant to believe you might be mistaken in Black--now get out of the way, or I will make you."

I do love irony. Snape talking about people being arrogant, when he is the only person being arrogant in the scene. 

> Carol:
> Granted, Snape is not only mistaken here but uncharacteristically irrational, absolutely certain that he's right and unwilling to listen to Lupin, but Lupin makes matters worse by calling Snape a fool and blaming his behavior on a schoolboy grudge, which not only infuriates Snape more but convinces Harry (and, through him, the reader) that Snape's only motivation is the so-called Prank. 

jkoney:
Yes, but at this point Lupin has figured out what is going on. He knows that Peter is the guilty one and just wants Snape to listen for a minute. 

Calling him a fool didn't help, but he tried the reasonable approach and it didn't work either. Snape was out of control and the only other option was to attack him. Which we know Harry and friends did, knocking Snape unconcious.






From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 18:41:12 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 18:41:12 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <gu6r7j+9a7v@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu7748+6d15@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186545

Carol earlier:
> > I was thinking strictly of the books and JKR's own sense of humor <snip>.
> > 
> > Sometimes, it's visual humor that depends on the image the reader conjures up in his or her imagination (Grawp patting Hagrid on the head, for example). But you're right about some of it being situational and character driven. <snip>
> > 
> > I do think, though, that JKR's ability to find comic moments in tragic or potentially tragic moments is one of her strengths as a writer. <snip>

> > Carol, who doesn't have access to Britcoms and is still somewhat at a loss regarding understated British humor (maybe I should look for it in Jane Austen!)
> >
Steve replied:
> 
> I found a lot of things funny in the Harry Potter books. Ron and the twins for example are hilarious.  Some of what they said and did offended some, but not me, I loved it all. Luna was my absolute favorite, as was everyone's responses to what she would say and do.

Carol again:
Oh, yes, Luna! Absolutely inspired lunacy most of the time (with an element of pathos as well). I didn't care for her much on first acquaintance (the Spectrespecs, etc.) but, as Ron says, she grows on you (well, me). I wasn't amused by "Loser's Lurgy," but I thought that the Rotfang Conspiracy was one of the funniest ideas in the books. I also thought that her reference to a Hufflepuff player as something like Bibble or Buggins and McGonagall yelling "Cadwallader!" was hilarious. Again, the reason it's funny seems to be incongruity and the element of surprise.

Steve wrote: 
> And for me at least, certain characters were simply comical on their own merits, w/o saying anything funny.  Crabbe and Goyle crack me up just standing behind Malfoy like grouchy gargoyles waiting to pounce.  Hagrid trying to squeeze through the doorway at the Burrough. Umbridge being carried off by the centaurs. Students in the common room puking up stuff as part of the twins experiments next to other students studying as if nothing strange is happening next to them. Kreacher hitting Mundungus w/ a frying pan. Ginny's favorite spell being bat boogies.  Gnomes being thrown out of the garden.

Carol responds:
Of all those examples, the only one that's funny to me is Kreacher hitting Mundungus with a frying pan. I don't generally like slapstick humor, but that particular instance--again, perhaps, because it's completely unexpected and at odd with my expectations for House Elves in general and Kreacher in particular--made me laugh out loud and want to read it again.

Steve: 
> There's a lot of tension at times in the novels. Humor is one of the best ways to alleviate tension and give the readers a chance to relax and move forward again. JKR created many characters that were real enough to be funny at times.  Those of us who appreciate that humor enjoy the books on a level others are unable or unwilling to.

Carol:
I agree with regard to the way humor functions in the novels, but I suspect that almost any reader will find something funny in them even if we don't all laugh at the same things. I'm "unable or unwilling" to laugh at Dudley Dursley and the Ton-Tongue Toffee, for example, but I'm delighted to laugh at Luna and sometimes Ron (when he's not being crude), but hyperbole and slapstick are usually not funny to me.
 
Steve: 
> Steve, who loves British comedies, especially Monty Python, Red Dwarf and Faulty Towers, but wishes anyone good luck in finding it in Jane Austen.

Carol:
I think you'd be surprised with regard to Jane Austen, who is one of JKR's favorite authors and, IMO, influenced her writing, especially with regard to misdirection and irony. But, of course, Austen's humor is much more subtle. 

Carol, who definitely needs to see Monty Python and/or "Fawlty Towers," as I think it's spelled, if only to get more in touch with British popular culture





From danjerri at madisoncounty.net  Sun May 10 18:53:26 2009
From: danjerri at madisoncounty.net (Jerri&Dan Chase)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 13:53:26 -0500
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <1241945673.754.25325.m5@yahoogroups.com>
References: <1241945673.754.25325.m5@yahoogroups.com>
Message-ID: <92E2BBF5BACC4FE080E6B394A6B11E17@JerriPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186546

> Carol again:
> Thanks for retrieving my lost post, which I'd forgotten about.
>The reason I posted it on OT was that I was hoping for someone
>British to help me with the famous concept of understated British
>humor. I don't think that JKR's sense of humor quite qualifies most
>of the time. The puns might: "griffin door knocker" (Gryffindor
>knocker) is so subtle that it probably goes right over the heads of
>most readers. But the examples you mention, especially the teenage
>boy humor (so crude that it strikes me as preteen) and the slapstick
>are anything but understated. JKR has a penchant for hyperbole,
>especially in dealing (sorry to say) with fat people. Slughorn, for
>example, takes up a quarter of the shop when he encounters the
>Trio at Honeydukes. Dudley at age thirteen or so (I forgot which
>book) has finally succeeded in becoming as broad as he is tall.

I have been thinking about JKR's use of Humor in the HP books and this 
discussion and relating it to other British authors whose humor I enjoy a 
lot.  I am an American who reads a lot of books by English and Scottish 
authors.  Some whose humor I enjoy include Georgette Heyer (who has a 
character named Flitwick and a nasty tutor named Snape), Angela Thirkell, 
and Dorothy L. Sayers (whose Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries we know that JKR 
has read and enjoyed.)  However, one English author whose humor seems very 
related to that in the HP books is P.G. Wodehouse.  He started writing 
English Boarding School stories, and is best known for the Jeeves and 
Wooster series.  These contain lots of physical humor, an "aunt" complex, 
stealing of policeman's helmets and cow creamers and cats and so on.

Also, the humor of the HP books as well as many aspects of the boarding 
school life, including inter-house rivalry can also find parallels in 
Kipling's series of short stories, now most available in book form, called 
Stalky and Co.

Now, how to define humor, and explain why something is funny to one person 
and not to another, that is a more complex issue.

Jerri




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 19:54:40 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 19:54:40 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <gu73sk+kber@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu7be0+qdse@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186547

Betsy Hp:
<SNIP>
I skipped everything having to do with Corambis because I haven't read it yet.
:D So dealing just with this part: Yes, Fake!Moody was a good teacher to a
certain extent. The autobahn is pretty darn cool. I'm *still* not going to
chat with a holocaust survivor about how, sure Hitler was bad at some things but
boy did he know good roads! Strikes me as rude, and also a colossal missing of
the point.

 
Alla:
So let me  try to rephrase it in completely non spoilerish way, I mean you read the first three books, I know  and we know that Felix did some things which were bad, right?.
Anyway, while I had read the first three books I totally thought that he has some very bad issues, but while I agreed with author that some of those things were bad, I really did not think that others were that bad, you know. Done out of guilt, grief, etc, but certainly not something that I felt he needed to spend a lot of time reexamining.


Well, let me just say that while I am reading Corambis, I am feeling (and it is not a spoiler, because I am only talking about my feelings here) that author does not leave me any space to disagree with her as to the things that Felix did, how to think about them. Does it make sense?

What is being done with this incident, I love so much more. Because you see, to me this one is so very not a moral problem Harry needs to think about, at least not more than for one second.

Here is how I see it. At first Harry sees a teacher punishing a boy who **deserved to be punished** IMO for something wrong that he did. Said teacher used a punishment, which was a bit over the top. He did not use an unforgivable on him, he did not make him bleed, he did not cause him any permanent injury. He caused him a humiliation and probably some pain. We do not even know if Draco felt any pain as human, don't we?

Then when we know that Fake!Moody is a DE, the only change that is in my mind is that the said teacher was a really bad bad person. But he still punished a nasty boy for something that nasty boy did wrong. There is of course an irony that he did not like Lucius much as DE who went free, but really this is to me nothing that requires any major reexamination on Harry's behalf.

But that is not my main point, I am certainly not arguing against your right to view it as some horrible thing that Harry must have been reevaluating in his mind. I am saying that I am glad that JKR did not put it up as a definite answer and leave a room for a reader to think both ways.

That of course does not mean that I do not think Harry should have reexamined some things (famous Crucio included), but to me since I do not often see Harry doing deep thinking on ethical dilemmas, to me it makes perfect sense that his action of giving up Elder wand could be viewed as a hint that he indeed does not want to trust himself with so much power. That he knows that he is capable of darker actions, etc.


Betty Hp:
I will say, I thought it was a cool choice to have Fake!Moody be a good and
charismatic teacher. It added a nice shade of gray to what should have become a
pretty dark character. But, per Harry, he never really became all that dark. 
*I* put pieces together and decided Fake!Moody was a bad sort that shouldn't
have been allowed around children, but I never got the sense JKR agreed with me.
Certainly Harry never thought through the implications of one of his favorite
teachers of that year being a sadist. <SNIP>

Alla:

He was a sadist, but I certainly do not agree that he acted as a sadist in that particular scene, if that makes sense. I can totally see real Moody punishing Draco the very same way.  I think that if Draco would have been taken in hand by his parents (no, wrong idea, I guess) or by his teachers earlier, and maybe if he was spanked ( HATE child's spanking, so believe me I am gritting my teeth when I am typing it, but I think Draco deserved it very much) on the regular basis in school, who knows maybe he would not have ended up on the Tower. 

But again, I am only arguing against the idea that we should have seen Harry reevaluating it. To me it is not much to reevaluate, but if it is, I like that it was left out and for the reader's imagination.

Do read Corambis, I can't wait to hear what you think.

JMO,

Alla





From frankd14612 at gmail.com  Sun May 10 18:42:21 2009
From: frankd14612 at gmail.com (Frank D)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 18:42:21 -0000
Subject: Why did Sirius trust Pettigrew? WAS: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal
In-Reply-To: <gu737b+sjpi@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu776d+l80d@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186548

Frank D: 
This may be old stuff to most on this list, but I am constantly being reminded of how ignorant I am about this subject. Please excuse me if this has been discussed and put to rest before.

I'm at a loss to answer this question with any degree of confidence: Why was such "blind" trust in Peter Pettigrew so firm among James/Sirius/Lupin? Especially since Pettigrew eventually proved to be such a weakling and (so obviously) a RAT? It just doesn't seem plausible to me that a person with such character faults could have been trusted so fully by James and Sirius. And shouldn't Lily have had some say in the decisions about who would be their life-protecting Secret Keeper?

A little background:

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
> 
> Carol again:
<snip> 
>
>. . . it *is* a fact (within canon) that Snape thinks Black entered the castle to murder Harry and that Lupin has been helping him all year. That assumption (also made by Dumbledore, Fudge, Mr. Weasley, and everyone else except Sirius Black himself and Pettigrew) would naturally strengthen Snape's view that Black betrayed the Potters to their deaths. 
> 
<snip>
> . . . Snape [has] every reason to believe that Sirius Black betrayed the Potters and no reason to think otherwise . . . 
>
<snip>
>
>But Dumbledore's efforts to protect Lily (and, of course, James and Harry) were in vain because James Potter trusted Sirius Black and made him the Secret Keeper. That, IMO, is why Snape is so furious at Black and the dead James--if it weren't for James Potter's blind trust in his friend, Lily would still be alive. (In DH, Dumbledore reinforces this belief, saying to the desperately grieving young Snape, "She {Lily] and James put their faith in the wrong person" and comparing their faith in their unworthy Secret Keeper to his own hope that Voldemort would spare Lily (DH Am. ed. 678), a comparison that Snape seems to hear only half of given his subsequent virulent hatred of the man he thinks is Lily's betrayer. In a way, he's right, but, of course, the friend that James trusted was Peter Pettigrew, not Black.
> 
<snip> 
> 
>

Frank D again:
Here is a bit of what I found on searching the list's history:

>Jan 28, 2008 8:37 pm
>Message #181103

Julie wrote: 
>
<snip>
>
>Given that Sirius treated Ratboy as little more than a sycophantic hanger-on who was lesser in every way than the other three, how could he NOT have suspected such lesser makeup might have included character and courage?
>
>Or at least that Ratboy might have some resentment issues over being
constantly reflected in the limelight of the Golden Duo throughout all their schooldays.
>
>As part of said Golden Duo, [James] was pretty dim too. And who in their right mind would refuse *Dumbledore*--one of the greatest
Wizards who ever lived--as Secret-Keeper, then hand the lives of his family over to reasonably competent at best Ratboy?

>Truly there should have been more to this whole story than what we got, including why James refused Dumbledore, what Dumbledore knew and why he let Snape go without obliviating him, why Sirius suspected Lupin and vice-versa, etc. But JKR didn't give it to us, so we can only work with what is there. And with our individual opinions and valuations of course ;-)

>Julie

Any help toward understanding this would be appreciated.

Frank D





From wildirishrose at fiber.net  Sun May 10 23:29:34 2009
From: wildirishrose at fiber.net (wildirishrose01us)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 23:29:34 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.
In-Reply-To: <gttf5v+rq7p@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu7o0u+106kk@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186549


> 
> Magpie:
> I don't think I'm taking anything out of context or exaggerating it. First, Harry's bad day has little to do with the definition of Crucio. I know he's in a bad mood, I know he's emotional, and I know he's angry when Carrow spits on McGonagall.
> 
> Harry uses the curse named for the Latin word for torture. A curse that we've seen numerous times in canon, and never for more than a few seconds. But only in this instance is it suddenly not torture because it didn't last a long time. 

Marianne:

Hmmmm.  I seem to recall in the book where the crucio curse was used for longer than a few seconds and repeatedly.  Hermione comes to mind.  That situation alone would be enough for me get fed up, the last straw so to speak, and use it.





From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Mon May 11 03:06:34 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 03:06:34 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <gu7748+6d15@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu84nq+4cv3@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186550


> Carol earlier:
> > > I was thinking strictly of the books and JKR's own sense of humor <snip>.
> > > 
> > > Sometimes, it's visual humor that depends on the image the reader conjures up in his or her imagination (Grawp patting Hagrid on the head, for example). But you're right about some of it being situational and character driven. <snip>
> > > 
> > > I do think, though, that JKR's ability to find comic moments in tragic or potentially tragic moments is one of her strengths as a writer. <snip>
> 
> > > Carol, who doesn't have access to Britcoms and is still somewhat at a loss regarding understated British humor (maybe I should look for it in Jane Austen!)
> > >
> Steve replied:
> > 
> > I found a lot of things funny in the Harry Potter books. Ron and the twins for example are hilarious.  Some of what they said and did offended some, but not me, I loved it all. Luna was my absolute favorite, as was everyone's responses to what she would say and do.
> 
> Carol again:
> Oh, yes, Luna! Absolutely inspired lunacy most of the time (with an element of pathos as well). I didn't care for her much on first acquaintance (the Spectrespecs, etc.) but, as Ron says, she grows on you (well, me). I wasn't amused by "Loser's Lurgy," but I thought that the Rotfang Conspiracy was one of the funniest ideas in the books. I also thought that her reference to a Hufflepuff player as something like Bibble or Buggins and McGonagall yelling "Cadwallader!" was hilarious. Again, the reason it's funny seems to be incongruity and the element of surprise.
> 
> Steve wrote: 
> > And for me at least, certain characters were simply comical on their own merits, w/o saying anything funny.  Crabbe and Goyle crack me up just standing behind Malfoy like grouchy gargoyles waiting to pounce.  Hagrid trying to squeeze through the doorway at the Burrough. Umbridge being carried off by the centaurs. Students in the common room puking up stuff as part of the twins experiments next to other students studying as if nothing strange is happening next to them. Kreacher hitting Mundungus w/ a frying pan. Ginny's favorite spell being bat boogies.  Gnomes being thrown out of the garden.
> 
> Carol responds:
> Of all those examples, the only one that's funny to me is Kreacher hitting Mundungus with a frying pan. I don't generally like slapstick humor, but that particular instance--again, perhaps, because it's completely unexpected and at odd with my expectations for House Elves in general and Kreacher in particular--made me laugh out loud and want to read it again.
> 
> Steve: 
> > There's a lot of tension at times in the novels. Humor is one of the best ways to alleviate tension and give the readers a chance to relax and move forward again. JKR created many characters that were real enough to be funny at times.  Those of us who appreciate that humor enjoy the books on a level others are unable or unwilling to.
> 
> Carol:
> I agree with regard to the way humor functions in the novels, but I suspect that almost any reader will find something funny in them even if we don't all laugh at the same things. I'm "unable or unwilling" to laugh at Dudley Dursley and the Ton-Tongue Toffee, for example, but I'm delighted to laugh at Luna and sometimes Ron (when he's not being crude), but hyperbole and slapstick are usually not funny to me.
>  
> Steve: 
> > Steve, who loves British comedies, especially Monty Python, Red Dwarf and Faulty Towers, but wishes anyone good luck in finding it in Jane Austen.
> 
> Carol:
> I think you'd be surprised with regard to Jane Austen, who is one of JKR's favorite authors and, IMO, influenced her writing, especially with regard to misdirection and irony. But, of course, Austen's humor is much more subtle. 
> 
> Carol, who definitely needs to see Monty Python and/or "Fawlty Towers," as I think it's spelled, if only to get more in touch with British popular culture


Steve adds:

I forgot to mention the sign outside of Fred and George's joke shop about You Know Who/Poo as something I laughed out loud at w/ Ron. On the other hand, I also didn't chuckle at the Dudley Ton-Tongue Toffee scene for some reason.  Perhaps like DD, I saw Dudley as a victom of being spoiled by his parents more than a stupid bully.  One of my favorite scenes in DH was between Harry and Dudley.  I think in the end, Dudley redeemed himself somewhat and showed promise for becoming a better and kinder person, in spite of his parents coddling him.

I misspelled Fawlty Towers intentionally as homage to what they did on the series. In all but one episode there is a sign outside the hotel where Fawlty Towers is misspelled or where letters are sideways or missing. Some of the misspellings were: Fatty Owls, Warty Towels, and Flays Otters. Basil Fawlty was played by the brilliant John Cleese. I wonder if JKR was a fan of Monty Python or Fawlty Towers as well.

Steve, who respects Jane Austen as an important author who influenced JKR in some ways, but for some reason has always been bored by her books.    




From dragonkeeper012003 at yahoo.com  Sun May 10 16:18:08 2009
From: dragonkeeper012003 at yahoo.com (dragonkeeper)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 09:18:08 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <gu6sqt+o0kd@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <415551.83457.qm@web53304.mail.re2.yahoo.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186551

sartoris22 wrote:
> > <snip> The best humor in The Potter books, in my opinion, is
> > situational and character driven. What makes it funny is who is
> > saying it under what circumstances.

Carol responded:
> Sometimes, it's visual humor that depends on the image the reader
> conjures up in his or her imagination (Grawp patting Hagrid on the
> head, for example). But you're right about some of it being
> situational and character driven. I remember laughing out loud when
> Harry, whose just been dragged out of the icy pool and saved from
> the Horcrux, hears a loud voice saying, "*Are*--*you* --*mental* ?"

Steve replied:
> I found a lot of things funny in the Harry Potter books. Ron and
> the twins for example are hilarious. Some of what they said and did
> offended some, but not me, I loved it all. Luna was my absolute
> favorite, as was everyone's responses to what she would say and do.
>
> And for me at least, certain characters were simply comical on
> their own merits, w/o saying anything funny.



One of my favorite humorous point is The Order of Phoenix chapter 3 when Lupin wishes to leave a note for Harry's Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petuna.

"We've got about a minute, I think. We should probably get into the garden so we're ready, Harry. I've left a letter telling your aunt and uncle not to worry---."

"They won't." said Harry

"That you're safe--."

"That'll just depress them."

"--and that you'll see them next summer."

"Do I have to?"

Gads, I wish that had been in the movie.

David



From brian at rescueddoggies.com  Mon May 11 12:31:50 2009
From: brian at rescueddoggies.com (Brian)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 09:31:50 -0300
Subject: Humor in HP
Message-ID: <4A081AB6.1030609@rescueddoggies.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186552

Finding humour in tragedy is very British.  You only have to look at the reaction after the London tube (metro) and bus bombings.

When the news reporter said "Shopkeepers are opening their doors 
bringing out blankets and cups of tea," I just smiled. It's like yes. 
That's Britain for you. Tea solves everything.

You're a bit cold?
Tea.
Your boyfriend has just left you?
Tea.
You've just been told you've got cancer?
Tea.
Coordinated terrorist attack on the transport network bringing the 
city to a grinding halt? TEA DAMMIT!

My kettle broke. We had to go and buy a new one. You can't have a 
national emergency without tea and the one time I tried to boil water in a saucepan, I spilt it all over the floor.

Though perhaps the funniest reaction was because it happened the day 
after London beat Paris to secure the Olympic Games.  "Wow!  I didn't 
think the French would be THAT upset!"

If anyone dared to find humour in 9-11, Americans found it offensive.  The Brits are just different in that way.  Just as medics and nurses tend to have humour which others would find in bad-taste because of all they deal with on a day-to-day basis, perhaps all Britain endured with the blitz had a lasting effect on British humour.

I find JKR's humour very British. "Oh of course, we're going to be 
hunting down the Horcruxes in a mobile library," etc.

Brian



From sweenlit at gmail.com  Mon May 11 15:38:49 2009
From: sweenlit at gmail.com (Lynda Cordova)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 07:38:49 -0800
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <4A081AB6.1030609@rescueddoggies.com>
References: <4A081AB6.1030609@rescueddoggies.com>
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No: HPFGUIDX 186553

I find the HP books to be very funny. Of course I like Britsh Humor better
than American. I don't even bother with American sitcoms. They aren't funny
to me. . .Well, I havn't checked out My Name is Earl yet. The commercials
look ok, and I occasionally catch the end of the George Lopez show, but
that's about it.

Lynda


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Mon May 11 16:41:40 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 16:41:40 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <4A081AB6.1030609@rescueddoggies.com>
Message-ID: <gu9kg4+8dn3@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186554

Brian wrote:
>
> Finding humour in tragedy is very British.  You only have to look at the reaction after the London tube (metro) and bus bombings.
> 
> When the news reporter said "Shopkeepers are opening their doors  bringing out blankets and cups of tea," I just smiled. It's like yes.  That's Britain for you. Tea solves everything. <snip>

Carol responds:
Right. We see that with Hagrid's buckets of tea (which I, not being British, didn't chuckle over) and possibly in McGonagall's fierce insistence that Harry eat a biscuit (I think it was a Ginger Newt), Yeah, that'll solve everything, Professor. :-)

Brian wrote: 
> If anyone dared to find humour in 9-11, Americans found it offensive.  The Brits are just different in that way.  Just as medics and nurses tend to have humour which others would find in bad-taste because of all they deal with on a day-to-day basis, perhaps all Britain endured with the blitz had a lasting effect on British humour.

Carol responds:
I can't imagine joking about 9/11. It would just seem sick. But I do recall an American sitcom of the 1960s in which Nazi soldiers were made into comic figures, so anything is possible. And there's also Woody Allen: "I could have been a lampshade," or something like that.

Still, you're right. Even if we (Americans) joke about serious topics, we don't generally joke about death and destruction, and jokes about disfigurement are considered to be in bad taste. While I found George's courage and his ability to find humor in his lost ear endearing, I found his bad puns ("holey," "'ear, 'ear," etc.) disconcerting, even ghastly, and distinctly unfunny. (But I did note their immediate reassuring effect on Fred and admired George for understanding his twin so well.)

Brian: 
> I find JKR's humour very British. "Oh of course, we're going to be hunting down the Horcruxes in a mobile library," etc.

Carol:
I liked that one, too. Also Ron's response when Hermione tells him that if she ran him through with a sword, his soul would remain intact: "Which would be a great comfort to me, I'm sure," or something like that. Understated irony, I suppose. Whatever it is, I laughed.

Carol, considering the possibility that JKR's humor, like young Tom Riddle's magic, is "all kinds"





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Mon May 11 17:02:30 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 17:02:30 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gu5hoi+lsh5@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu9ln6+pk04@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186555


> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Going back to the post that inspired this one, as Montavilla47 pointed out, not every reader is going to enjoy going back for a reread.  I think JKR would have been asking too much of her young readers if she expected them to do as much.  So I think it was a bad writing choice if that was indeed her intention.

Pippin:
But young readers who love a book read it over and over again. OTOH, if they  didn't like the book or were indifferent to it, why would it have any great influence on the way they think?


Betsy_Hp 
> But as far as Harry not re-examining so that I'd be forced to, I'm not made squirmy about it on *my* account.  It's Harry that I'm bothered about.  Yes, I *do* expect him to have a "wow I should have known" moment.  Because he gleefully watched an adult mistreat a schoolboy. 

Pippin:
Sorry, but where is this gleefulness in canon? *Ron* is gleeful. Hermione is indignant. The narrator doesn't tell us how Harry felt. It's certainly easy to imagine that he felt gleeful, but in that case we can imagine his later chagrin as well. More likely he didn't know how he felt, except intensely curious about "Moody".


> Betsy Hp:
> But I *did* pick up on this.  It was kind of red-banner as far as I was concerned. That's what makes me squirmy.  Not that Harry missed small things, he missed *massive* things.  At least as per me.  *I* thought about the implications of Neville being alone in the classroom with the man who tortured his parents to madness at a time when he was emotionally vulnerable.  I thought about it, and thought about it, and the books never dealt with it at all.  In fact they go the opposite way and have one of Neville's classmates praise that DE in front of him.


Pippin:
I'm not sure what you're getting at, here. Yes, Neville was manipulated in a very ugly way. But Harry and the readers certainly find out how that feels when Harry thinks that Dumbledore betrayed him. It's  far more immediate to explore the issue that way than to have Harry speculate about Neville's feelings. 

One of the things that make HBP a good read for me, in spite of the unfortunate chest monster, is the way Harry is so proud of himself for recognizing the attempts of Slughorn and Scrimgeour to manipulate him, while all the time he's doing backflips for Dumbledore. 

As for Harry's classmates, the official line in OOP is that the fake Moody was a maniac who *thought* he was taking orders from Voldemort. It's not clear that anyone but the Trio even knows who the imposter really was, much less that he was a genuine DE and had a history with Neville. 


Dean isn't being deliberately tactless by remarking on Fake!Moody's skill as a teacher, he's just ignorant, and part of that ignorance is Neville's own choice.

We might notice that despite whatever admiration he retained for fake Moody's methods, Harry doesn't put the DA under the Imperius curse to show them how to resist it.  


Betsy_Hp 
> I will say, I don't recall Harry ever struggling with his own moral awareness.  *That's* what I was missing. 

Pippin:

But that's an adult thing, and Harry's status as an adult is deliberately ambiguous. It's pointed out that in real world Britain a seventeen year old  is legally a child -- an innocent. 

 JKR writes the story so that innocents who identify with Harry  can continue to do so, while adults can recognize that Harry couldn't  make the decisions he makes as an adult without knowing that  moral failures are a part of being human and that everyone shares some responsibility for the existence of evil in the world. 

But taking responsibility does not mean beating yourself up.

Harry blamed himself for not being able to save Cedric and relived the moments leading to his death over and over again. That's the dawning of his moral awareness. But when JKR's characters define themselves as moral failures, it's paralyzing.  It doesn't empower them to change. 

What empowers characters to change, in canon, is believing that they can and should make a difference for others. If they believe that, then it doesn't matter how bad they feel about what they did before, still less whether they could or couldn't have prevented the consequences.

Do you think it mattered to the people who were being threatened by Grindelwald how  much responsibility Dumbledore bore for the death of his sister? Do you think Goyle cared that one of the people who saved him from burning to death was a Dark Arts supporter and another had once used the cruciatus curse and they're possibly not sorry about it?  Who cares whether they're sorry or not?

Aberforth accused Dumbledore of  getting over the death of their sister. What he really wanted was a scapegoat -- he wanted Dumbledore to have the guilt instead of him. But what mattered was that Aberforth's help was needed and he could give it, if he wasn't lost in feeling sorry for himself and hating his brother. 

Lupin is always very sorry for what he's done, he re-thinks constantly, and it doesn't do diddly to stop him from doing the same things again. In canon, knowing that someone re-thought what they did doesn't  provide any assurance at all that they won't do it again. 

Percy is made to admit he was a ministry-loving git, and what's the point? Fred, who thought it was so important to get that straight, is dead moments later.  

 
> Betsy Hp:
> You won't be prevented and, if you're a good guy, you don't have to re-think it if you *do* use it. 

Pippin:
But that's the point of free will, that no one can force you to accept moral responsibility. 

Betsy Hp"
Which yes, doesn't fit in with my "little fictional mythology of good guys and bad guys".  Again, it's why I'm squirmy about these books.  (I'm old-fashioned in that I see the "mythology of good guys and bad guys" as neither "little" nor strictly "fictional".  There's a lot that's foundational and instructive to real-life issues in those sort of mythologies.  It's why they're still told, I think.)

Pippin:
I called it a "little fictional mythology" because the people who are seriously dealing with evil in our society don't divide the world into good guys and bad guys. IMO that's not the way that modern philosophy and theologians and human behavior experts talk about evil. 

I love, love, love Tolkien. But the only moral responsibility for evil that a good guy has in Tolkien is not to seek power above his station. That's fine if you believe in the feudal system, and maybe Tolkien did. But I think JKR is trying to get us to consider that maybe we believe other things now.

That mythology has a lot of power, as you say, but  it can be manipulative as well as inspiring, and I think  JKR shows how it's used to create scapegoats. Young James and Albus think that way because they have to think that way.  As children they need to believe in their own innocence and in the innocence of those they depend on, and so they need to see evil as coming from Outside.

 But adults don't have to believe that, and canon says we ought to be suspicious when anyone tries to lead us in that direction.

Pippin






From k12listmomma at comcast.net  Mon May 11 17:13:06 2009
From: k12listmomma at comcast.net (k12listmomma)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 11:13:06 -0600
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Why did Sirius trust Pettigrew? WAS: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal
References: <gu776d+l80d@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <5C117E948A7C4AB0807438B68CFDA4CE@homemain>

No: HPFGUIDX 186556


> Frank D:
> This may be old stuff to most on this list, but I am constantly being 
> reminded of how ignorant I am about this subject. Please excuse me if this 
> has been discussed and put to rest before.
>
> I'm at a loss to answer this question with any degree of confidence: Why 
> was such "blind" trust in Peter Pettigrew so firm among 
> James/Sirius/Lupin? Especially since Pettigrew eventually proved to be 
> such a weakling and (so obviously) a RAT? It just doesn't seem plausible 
> to me that a person with such character faults could have been trusted so 
> fully by James and Sirius. And shouldn't Lily have had some say in the 
> decisions about who would be their life-protecting Secret Keeper?

Shelley:
I don't think that it ever was a matter that Peter was trusted, and Sirius 
"wasn't". The switch of Secret Keepers was last minute, and was meant to 
confuse any enemy who thought they had it figured out. It was meant to be a 
tactical decision, not one based on "trust" or "lack of trust" of anyone to 
do the job properly. What everyone didn't realize at the time is that they 
where handing the key directly to the traitor, not protecting that 
information from the traitor.

But I agree, surely Peter would have shown some sort of weaknesses before 
this point that his friends would have noticed, but maybe they were blind to 
such faults. They were too busy using Peter, and Peter followed. I can only 
think that having a rat in the party would have helped the Marauders enter 
places where they shouldn't have gone, as a rat can get into places where 
people can't, or a larger Animagus wouldn't fit. A rat could have slipped 
under a door to then open it from the inside, and to then lock it again from 
the inside and slip back out so that it appeared to be undisturbed after the 
fact. Maybe the other Marauders didn't think being a rat was a character 
issue, but just focused on how handy it would be to have someone who could 
be small and sneaky as an asset to their trouble-making. These other 
Marauders weren't saints, either. If Peter never so much as squeaked about 
their misdeeds, they would think he was being loyal, and never did they 
suspect that Peter could have kept a secret about meeting Voldemort from 
them at the same time. That ability to keep secrets was probably the most 
important reason why switching to him last second made sense!

I imagine that Peter kept to himself any dealings with Voldemort. We don't 
know if he was threatened into becoming what he was, or what that situation 
was that lead Peter to cross that line to betray his friends. I think if the 
situation had drawn out longer, the others would have figured it out, but I 
think Peter couldn't have been a Death Eater for very long at all when that 
incident happened, and he was pleased as punch to be a very valuable service 
to Voldemort. I don't think he ever was a leader, and just did what the 
other Marauders told him to. So, having Voldemort for a master was in 
essence just "switching masters". He was important in only what he could do 
for someone more important than him, and I think he lived on praise, rather 
than having a strong sense of self-esteem to think for himself.

Shelley





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Mon May 11 19:32:43 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 19:32:43 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gu9ln6+pk04@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gu9ugr+1rsi@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186557

> Betsy_Hp 
> > But as far as Harry not re-examining so that I'd be forced to, I'm not made squirmy about it on *my* account.  It's Harry that I'm bothered about.  Yes, I *do* expect him to have a "wow I should have known" moment.  Because he gleefully watched an adult mistreat a schoolboy. 
> 
> Pippin:
> Sorry, but where is this gleefulness in canon? *Ron* is gleeful. Hermione is indignant. The narrator doesn't tell us how Harry felt. It's certainly easy to imagine that he felt gleeful, but in that case we can imagine his later chagrin as well. More likely he didn't know how he felt, except intensely curious about "Moody".

Carol responds:
We do see the adult McGonagall expressing outrage, stating that they don't use Transfiguration to punish students. (I'm guessing that the staff don't use magic of any kind to punish students--unless they're Umbridge or the Carrows.) But, of course, Harry, who dislikes Draco Malfoy and thinks that "Moody" is a paranoid, half-crazy old Auror, doesn't pick up on the hint that "Moody" is a sinister and dangerous person. If he hates the Malfoys, he must be on the good side. It's masterful misdirection. And Harry isn't given time to rethink it. By the time he realizes who "Moody" really is, Barty Jr. has committed much more serious offenses directly involving Harry, including sending him to the graveyard to be murdered. He doesn't look back and say, "I should have known that "Moody" was no good or an imposter because he turned Draco Malfoy into a ferret and bounced him or because he used Imperius on the students and enjoyed Crucioing that spider despite the effect on Neville. No one expects sensitivity from a tough, half-crazy old ex-Auror who's (supposedly) teaching them how to fight Dark Wizards. And he "kindly" takes Neville into his office afterward to lend him a Herbology book. It's brilliant misdirection (and brilliant acting on Barty Jr.'s part). The characters won't rethink it, but a lot of readers will. I immediately disliked "Moody" because of his methods, including helping Harry to cheat on the tasks, but it never occurred to me that he was a DE in disguise trying to kill Harry or that he put Harry's name in the Goblet of Fire. It was only when I went back to understand how I could have been fooled that I recognized the actions that had made me uncomfortable (and which the narrator seemed to approve of or be indifferent to) as hints that the character was evil.

At any rate, I understand exactly how Betsy feels, especially since I so strongly disapproved of "Moody" even when I thought that he was a good guy. But I agree with Pippin that the reader, at least the alert reader, is supposed to reread GoF from a new perspective. I also think it's best that we *don't* have Harry or the narrator going back over events and reevaluating them. It's really much more satisfactory to do it ourselves, whether we're adults or intelligent children, who really can figure more things out for themselves than many adults give them credit for.

> > Betsy Hp:
> > But I *did* pick up on this.  It was kind of red-banner as far as I was concerned. That's what makes me squirmy.  Not that Harry missed small things, he missed *massive* things.  At least as per me.  *I* thought about the implications of Neville being alone in the classroom with the man who tortured his parents to madness at a time when he was emotionally vulnerable.  I thought about it, and thought about it, and the books never dealt with it at all.  In fact they go the opposite way and have one of Neville's classmates praise that DE in front of him.
> 
> 
> Pippin:
> I'm not sure what you're getting at, here. Yes, Neville was manipulated in a very ugly way. But Harry and the readers certainly find out how that feels when Harry thinks that Dumbledore betrayed him. It's  far more immediate to explore the issue that way than to have Harry speculate about Neville's feelings. <snip>

Carol responds:
I think that Betsy (correct me if I'm wrong, and, BTW, good to see you back!) is responding specifically to GoF. *Hermione* picks up on Neville's feelings and asks "Moody" to stop Crucioing the spider because of its effect on Neville, but Harry moments later sees his first Avada Kedavra, the spell that killed his parents, and can be excused, I think, from not being aware of Neville's feelings when he's preoccupied with his own. But the hints are there for the reader to pick up on--there's something at best cold and indifferent and at worst sinister about this "Moody" character. (I used to think that Dumbledore should have gotten the idea that "Moody" was an imposter when he asked Dumbledore's permission to use the Unforgiveable Curses on the students, including fourth years. I suppose Dumbledore thought that desperate times called for desperate measures, particularly with regard to Harry's education, but I still wonder whether the real Moody would have felt the same way. To me, it was another sign that something was wrong, but, then, Crouch had authorized the Aurors to use the Unforgiveables against DEs, so maybe the Ministry had authorized using them on students--not the same as teaching the kids to use the spells, but I still don't like it and I'm afraid that JKR would disagree with me.)

At any rate, I've already explained why I don't think Harry reacts to "Moody's" methods. It's also interesting that the narrator slips out of Harry's perspective to note that Harry isn't the only one lying awake the night after that lesson. So is Neville--a hint that he found it very disturbing, regardless of "Moody's" intentions. (He's not aware, of course, that the man who tortured that spider was one of the four who Crucio'd his parents into insanity. I can't recall whether he ever finds out.)

Pippin:
> As for Harry's classmates, the official line in OOP is that the fake Moody was a maniac who *thought* he was taking orders from Voldemort. It's not clear that anyone but the Trio even knows who the imposter really was, much less that he was a genuine DE and had a history with Neville.  
> 
> Dean isn't being deliberately tactless by remarking on Fake!Moody's skill as a teacher, he's just ignorant, and part of that ignorance is Neville's own choice.

Carol responds:

Good point. We do know that Neville never talks about his parents and is embarrassed when HRH encounter him in the closed ward at St. Mungo's. We can be pretty sure that Dean has no idea that "Moody" helped torture the Longbottoms into insanity. But maybe Neville's lack of reaction is because he doesn't know it, either.

As for Harry, he doesn't seem to have any hard feelings for Barty Jr., oddly enough. He's aware (in HBP) of the irony that the idea of becoming an Auror was first suggested to him by a DE in disguise, but he still likes the idea. And quite possibly, he found "Moody's" lessons useful despite the fact that "Moody" never expected him to survive to put them to use. He doesn't blame "Moody" or even Wormtail for Cedric's death. He places all the blame, rightly or wrongly, on Voldemort. Maybe it's because Barty Jr. is soul-sucked before his eyes, having received the worst possible punishment for his crimes, so Harry, IIRC, hardly thinks about him (except when he first encounters the real Moody).

Pippin: 
> We might notice that despite whatever admiration he retained for fake Moody's methods, Harry doesn't put the DA under the Imperius curse to show them how to resist it.  

Carol:
I don't know whether he retained any admiration for "Moody's" methods. I think he may have found them useful for himself, certainly in comparison with Umbridge, but at that point (the DA meeting), he's still never performed or even attempted an Unforgiveable Curse himself. He doesn't attempt his first Crucio until after Bellatrix kills Sirius Black, and his first rather feeble Imperius (followed by a stronger one) doesn't occur until DH (after he's of age, if that makes a difference, and after the DEs have taken over the MoM). I don't think that Harry had, to use Snape's words, either "the nerve or the ability" to cast an Imperius at that point, and he would not have attempted it, in any case, because it was illegal. Even though Harry didn't approve of the Ministry, especially as represented by Umbridge, I doubt that he would have considered using an Unforgiveable Curse at that time, especially on his friends, not because he was rejecting "Moody's" methods but because he still recalled Black's fierce disapproval of Crouch Sr.'s authorization of those curses by Aurors. And, of course, he didn't know how to perform one. (What if something went wrong?) Best to teach them tried-and-true spells like Expelliarmus and Stupefy and Protego.
 
> Betsy_Hp 
> > I will say, I don't recall Harry ever struggling with his own moral awareness.  *That's* what I was missing. 
> 
> Pippin:
> 
> But that's an adult thing, and Harry's status as an adult is deliberately ambiguous. It's pointed out that in real world Britain a seventeen year old  is legally a child -- an innocent. 
> 
>  JKR writes the story so that innocents who identify with Harry  can continue to do so, while adults can recognize that Harry couldn't  make the decisions he makes as an adult without knowing that moral failures are a part of being human and that everyone shares some responsibility for the existence of evil in the world. <snip>

Carol responds:
Good point. HP isn't an Aesop's fable in which the moral (if any) is openly stated. The books are open to interpretation, and different readers will identify different themes (or none) and arrive at different conclusions about the morality depicted in the books. If Harry arrived at the "right" conclusions himself, the readers would have no reason to think for themselves. Besides, Harry still has to be wrong about a few things, including the desire for revenge and just possibly the use of Unforgiveable Curses, even after he reaches seventeen so that he can finally grow up and make the right decisions regarding Hallows vs. Horcruxes, Snape, self-sacrifice, the Elder Wand and whatever else I may be forgetting near the end of the book. It's a Bildungsroman, among other things, and Harry can't grow up if he hasn't made mistakes as the result of his immaturity before he arrives at what some of the English Romantics would have labeled Wisdom. 

Pippin:

> Percy is made to admit he was a ministry-loving git, and what's the point? Fred, who thought it was so important to get that straight, is dead moments later. <snip>
> 
Carol:
You make their reconciliation and their moment of brotherly affection together, which to me is poignantly ironic, seem pointless. I think it *does* matter, if only to Percy, that Fred died having forgiven him and welcomed him back into the family. Percy's grief at watching his brother die laughing at *his* joke and being unable to save him is nothing compared with the grief and guilt he would have felt if he hadn't returned and been forgiven (it would be like Mrs. Weasley fearing that the Twins would die when her last words to them were scolding them for not destroying the WWWs in their pockets only worse).  And Fred died happy. It's ironic, certainly, but not pointless. At least, not to me.
 
Carol, now wondering exactly what cover story Dumbledore told the students about the "maniac" who taught DADA in fourth year




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Mon May 11 20:31:59 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 20:31:59 -0000
Subject: Why did Sirius trust Pettigrew? WAS: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal
In-Reply-To: <5C117E948A7C4AB0807438B68CFDA4CE@homemain>
Message-ID: <gua1vv+pe7l@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186558

Frank D wrote:
<snip>
> > I'm at a loss to answer this question with any degree of confidence: Why was such "blind" trust in Peter Pettigrew so firm among James/Sirius/Lupin? Especially since Pettigrew eventually proved to be such a weakling and (so obviously) a RAT? It just doesn't seem plausible to me that a person with such character faults could have been trusted so fully by James and Sirius. And shouldn't Lily have had some say in the decisions about who would be their life-protecting Secret Keeper?

Carol responds:
Lupin says in DH, when he thinks there's a new traitor in the Order who's tipped off Voldemort to the time and date that Harry will be leaving, that Harry (who doesn't want to mistrust anyone in the group, even Mundungus) that James would have considered it the epitome of dishonor (or something like that) to distrust his friends. If Lupin is right, that would explain why James never questioned the fawning and seemingly incompetent Wormtail's devotion to him. After all, he and sirius had taught Peter how to become an Animagus, including him in their midnight wanderings with a werewolf. How could he not be grateful?

Sirius, however, seems to have suspected that the traitor was Remus, at least that's what they say in PoA. In contrast to James, who apparently refused to suspect any of them, Lupin and Black suspected each other. (I can find the relevant quotation if you want it.)

As for Lily, she's not mentioned, but I'm sure that she was consulted. After all, she was part of the Secret. I've always suspected that she performed the Fidelius Charm since Dumbledore clearly didn't. Ollivander refers to her first wand as "a nice wand for Charm work" just as James's is specifically suited to Transfiguration, which suggests that she could have performed a complex charm like Fidelius. Anyway, I can't see her standing aside and letting the men make all the decisions. That would be completely out of character.

Shelley:
> I don't think that it ever was a matter that Peter was trusted, and Sirius "wasn't". The switch of Secret Keepers was last minute, and was meant to confuse any enemy who thought they had it figured out. It was meant to be a tactical decision, not one based on "trust" or "lack of trust" of anyone to do the job properly. What everyone didn't realize at the time is that they where handing the key directly to the traitor, not protecting that information from the traitor.

Carol:
Right. But, still, both Sirius, who made the suggestion, and James (and Lily), who accepted it, trusted Wormtail to be faithful to them: "fidelis -e [trusty , steadfast, faithful]; m. as subst., esp. pl., [confidants, faithful friends]. Adv. fideliter, [faithfully; securely, without danger]. fidelitas -atis f. [faithfulness , trust, fidelity]."
 
http://catholic.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl?stem=fidel&ending=

The only person who wasn't in on the Secret Keeper change was Lupin, which must mean that he also wasn't in on the Secret itself. So possibly, when he's talking (bitterly and angrily) about James thinking it was dishonorable to distrust his friends, he's not being entirely truthful. Either that or JKR has forgotten that bit in PoA about Lupin being left out of the Secret.

Shelley:
> But I agree, surely Peter would have shown some sort of weaknesses before this point that his friends would have noticed, but maybe they were blind to such faults. They were too busy using Peter, and Peter followed. <snip>

Carol:
I agree. Granted, Sirius found Peter's fawning admiration of James annoying (who wouldn't, except arrogant James?), but it never seems to have occurred to them that Peter might resent being treated as a tagalong who wasn't as brilliant as his friends. (I know that many people disagree with me, but I think that Lupin, who was sometimes excluded from Padfoot and Prongs's escapades along with Wormtail, suffered similar treatment in some respects. After all, *he* had to study for the Transfiguration OWL and Sirius, who must have studied Transfiguration after hours with an entirely different motivation to become an Animagus, disdainfully dismisses his request to test him over it. Lupin is "cool" because he's a werewolf, but his personality is so different from there's that he's not the best buddy of either James or Sirius.) Anyway, Lupin would have been busy wanting to be liked, and James and Sirius would have been busy acting arrogant and superior and getting into trouble, and no one would have noticed that Wormtail had any undesirable traits other than a tendency to drool over James's Quidditch skills or get questions about werewolves wrong on the DADA OWL.

Shelley:
> Maybe the other Marauders didn't think being a rat was a character  issue, but just focused on how handy it would be to have someone who could be small and sneaky as an asset to their trouble-making. These other Marauders weren't saints, either. If Peter never so much as squeaked about their misdeeds, they would think he was being loyal, and never did they suspect that Peter could have kept a secret about meeting Voldemort from them at the same time. <snip>

Carol:
Agreed that he was useful and never ratted on them. Also, of course, they viewed him as incompetent and wholly dependent on them, needing James's protection for his weakness (Sirius's comment about Wormtail being drawn to the biggest bully on the block, or something like that, an interesting reflection on James coming from his best friend!). I don't think it occurred to them for a moment that he'd dare to approach Voldemort or bear any kind of resentment toward James, as he must have done to be willing to betray him. (I don't think it was *just* fear, but, as Frank says, there's a lot we don't know.)

With regard to the rat Animagus form not revealing that Peter was a potential rat of another sort (I like pet rats, BTW, and apologize to any rat lovers for the stereotypes), I think they must have thought that it suited him--small, pointy-nosed, in need of their protection, preferring to hide rather than fight and sleep rather than work. Scabbers, after all, is pretty innocuous most of the time. So I don't think his Animagus form gave them any clues at all as to his real nature.

Shelley:
> I think Peter couldn't have been a Death Eater for very long at all when that incident happened, and he was pleased as punch to be a very valuable service to Voldemort. <snip>

Carol:
I don't know that he was "pleased as punch." The letter in DH seems to indicate that he was uncomfortable choosing between himself and his friends though, of course, the choice was inevitable given who he was. And I'm not sure that he was a Death Eater then. A Dark Mark would have been a bit of a giveaway if Dumbledore decided to examine Order members' arms looking for a traitor. But Sirius says in the Shrieking Shack that Wormtail had been passing information on the Order to Voldemort for nearly a year before the Potters were killed (which makes it odd that he didn't reveal that information before Dumbledore suggested the Fidelius Charm) and Wormtail doesn't deny the charge. At any rate, we first see him as an actual Death Eater in GoF. It's possible that his Dark Mark is still new at that point. (The narrator says that he goes to his place in the circle of DEs after receiving his new hand, but maybe he just takes the nearest empty spot. After all, the scene is from Harry's point of view and he can't possibly know whether Wormtail has attended any previous DE meetings or not.)

Carol, who thinks that JKR hasn't given us all the pieces of the puzzle and that the pieces we do have don't fit together quite as neatly as they should




From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Mon May 11 22:15:57 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 22:15:57 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gu9ln6+pk04@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gua82t+s6ob@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186559

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
> 
> Betsy_Hp 
> > But as far as Harry not re-examining so that I'd be forced to, I'm not made squirmy about it on *my* account.  It's Harry that I'm bothered about.  Yes, I *do* expect him to have a "wow I should have known" moment.  Because he gleefully watched an adult mistreat a schoolboy. 
> 
> Pippin:
> Sorry, but where is this gleefulness in canon? *Ron* is gleeful. Hermione is indignant. The narrator doesn't tell us how Harry felt. It's certainly easy to imagine that he felt gleeful, but in that case we can imagine his later chagrin as well. More likely he didn't know how he felt, except intensely curious about "Moody".
> 

jkoney:
I just don't see Harry looking back and feeling bad about this. Malfoy had just sent a curse at Harry. I see Harry at the time happy that Malfoy got caught and punished. Later on, I see him thinking how ironic that a DE punished a junior DE.

> Pippin:
> I called it a "little fictional mythology" because the people who are seriously dealing with evil in our society don't divide the world into good guys and bad guys. IMO that's not the way that modern philosophy and theologians and human behavior experts talk about evil. 
> 
> I love, love, love Tolkien. But the only moral responsibility for evil that a good guy has in Tolkien is not to seek power above his station. That's fine if you believe in the feudal system, and maybe Tolkien did. But I think JKR is trying to get us to consider that maybe we believe other things now.
> 
jkoney:
I'm not sure what you are saying about Tolkien. 




From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Mon May 11 22:32:46 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 22:32:46 -0000
Subject: Why did Sirius trust Pettigrew? WAS: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal
In-Reply-To: <gua1vv+pe7l@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gua92e+vfse@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186560

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
> Carol responds:
> Lupin says in DH, when he thinks there's a new traitor in the Order who's tipped off Voldemort to the time and date that Harry will be leaving, that Harry (who doesn't want to mistrust anyone in the group, even Mundungus) that James would have considered it the epitome of dishonor (or something like that) to distrust his friends. If Lupin is right, that would explain why James never questioned the fawning and seemingly incompetent Wormtail's devotion to him. After all, he and sirius had taught Peter how to become an Animagus, including him in their midnight wanderings with a werewolf. How could he not be grateful?
> 
> Sirius, however, seems to have suspected that the traitor was Remus, at least that's what they say in PoA. In contrast to James, who apparently refused to suspect any of them, Lupin and Black suspected each other. (I can find the relevant quotation if you want it.)
> 
> As for Lily, she's not mentioned, but I'm sure that she was consulted. After all, she was part of the Secret. I've always suspected that she performed the Fidelius Charm since Dumbledore clearly didn't. Ollivander refers to her first wand as "a nice wand for Charm work" just as James's is specifically suited to Transfiguration, which suggests that she could have performed a complex charm like Fidelius. Anyway, I can't see her standing aside and letting the men make all the decisions. That would be completely out of character.
> 
snip
> 
> Shelley:
> > But I agree, surely Peter would have shown some sort of weaknesses before this point that his friends would have noticed, but maybe they were blind to such faults. They were too busy using Peter, and Peter followed. <snip>
> 
> Carol:
> I agree. Granted, Sirius found Peter's fawning admiration of James annoying (who wouldn't, except arrogant James?), but it never seems to have occurred to them that Peter might resent being treated as a tagalong who wasn't as brilliant as his friends. (I know that many people disagree with me, but I think that Lupin, who was sometimes excluded from Padfoot and Prongs's escapades along with Wormtail, suffered similar treatment in some respects. After all, *he* had to study for the Transfiguration OWL and Sirius, who must have studied Transfiguration after hours with an entirely different motivation to become an Animagus, disdainfully dismisses his request to test him over it. Lupin is "cool" because he's a werewolf, but his personality is so different from there's that he's not the best buddy of either James or Sirius.) Anyway, Lupin would have been busy wanting to be liked, and James and Sirius would have been busy acting arrogant and superior and getting into trouble, and no one would have noticed that Wormtail had any undesirable traits other than a tendency to drool over James's Quidditch skills or get questions about werewolves wrong on the DADA OWL.

jkoney:
I actually think JKR got the whole "boys" interactions very well. Boys/teenage boys hang out in groups where there is usually one or sometimes two who are the "alpha" males. They are the leaders. If there are two of them (and they get along) there is constant one upmanship going on. The other boys rarely upstage them, although they can come up with suggestions.

Obviously, James and Sirius were the leaders of this group. Remus was the quiet guy who hung out with them and Peter was the guy who hung around hoping some of the prestige rubbed off. I can say with some experience that this is quite common among boys. There may be teasing among the group, but no one else on the outside can do it without having to face the entire group. 

There is loyalty in the group so no suspects that the other would turn on them. Hence we get James never believing that one of his friends would be the traitor and Sirius saying we would have died for you. 


 
> Shelley:
> > I think Peter couldn't have been a Death Eater for very long at all when that incident happened, and he was pleased as punch to be a very valuable service to Voldemort. <snip>
> 
> Carol:
> I don't know that he was "pleased as punch." The letter in DH seems to indicate that he was uncomfortable choosing between himself and his friends though, of course, the choice was inevitable given who he was. And I'm not sure that he was a Death Eater then. A Dark Mark would have been a bit of a giveaway if Dumbledore decided to examine Order members' arms looking for a traitor. But Sirius says in the Shrieking Shack that Wormtail had been passing information on the Order to Voldemort for nearly a year before the Potters were killed (which makes it odd that he didn't reveal that information before Dumbledore suggested the Fidelius Charm) and Wormtail doesn't deny the charge. At any rate, we first see him as an actual Death Eater in GoF. It's possible that his Dark Mark is still new at that point. (The narrator says that he goes to his place in the circle of DEs after receiving his new hand, but maybe he just takes the nearest empty spot. After all, the scene is from Harry's point of view and he can't possibly know whether Wormtail has attended any previous DE meetings or not.)

jkoney:
I don't believe he was a DE at the time, because like you said the dark mark would have given him away.

Sirius said that he was giving away information, but that was because they suspected there was a spy, not that Peter was the spy. Only afterwards could Sirius determine that it was Peter giving away the information. If he had any misgivings about Peter he wouldn't have suggested him for the secret keeper.




From philipwhiuk at hotmail.com  Tue May 12 00:26:10 2009
From: philipwhiuk at hotmail.com (Philip)
Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 01:26:10 +0100
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Why did Sirius trust Pettigrew? WAS: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal
In-Reply-To: <gua92e+vfse@eGroups.com>
References: <gua1vv+pe7l@eGroups.com> <gua92e+vfse@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <BAY116-DS5C250598D928DA92AF737A3600@phx.gbl>

No: HPFGUIDX 186561

> Shelley:
> > I think Peter couldn't have been a Death Eater for very long at all when
that incident happened, and he was pleased as punch to be a very valuable
service to Voldemort. <snip>
> 
> Carol:
> I don't know that he was "pleased as punch." The letter in DH seems to
indicate that he was uncomfortable choosing between himself and his friends
though, of course, the choice was inevitable given who he was. And I'm not
sure that he was a Death Eater then. A Dark Mark would have been a bit of a
giveaway if Dumbledore decided to examine Order members' arms looking for a
traitor. But Sirius says in the Shrieking Shack that Wormtail had been
passing information on the Order to Voldemort for nearly a year before the
Potters were killed (which makes it odd that he didn't reveal that
information before Dumbledore suggested the Fidelius Charm) and Wormtail
doesn't deny the charge. At any rate, we first see him as an actual Death
Eater in GoF. It's possible that his Dark Mark is still new at that point.
(The narrator says that he goes to his place in the circle of DEs after
receiving his new hand, but maybe he just takes the nearest empty spot.
After all, the scene is from Harry's point of view and he can't possibly
know whether Wormtail has attended any previous DE meetings or not.)

jkoney:
I don't believe he was a DE at the time, because like you said the dark mark
would have given him away.

Sirius said that he was giving away information, but that was because they
suspected there was a spy, not that Peter was the spy. Only afterwards could
Sirius determine that it was Peter giving away the information. If he had
any misgivings about Peter he wouldn't have suggested him for the secret
keeper.

Philip:
Sirius may have learnt it from others in Azkaban. Certainly, like
Dumbledore, Voldemort would have been careful to ensure that Wormtail was
not obviously a Death Eater. I suspect he may have received his mark when he
was able to betray the Potters. This would seem a suitably useful piece of
information worthy of such a position. Also as soon as this happened, his
spying ability was useless. It is of course possible that the reason
Pettigrew murdered Sirius was to ensure his cover was retained - Sirius
would have blown it otherwise.






From foxmoth at qnet.com  Tue May 12 03:01:54 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 03:01:54 -0000
Subject: Why did Sirius trust Pettigrew? WAS: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal
In-Reply-To: <gu776d+l80d@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guaor2+nojv@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186562

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Frank D" <frankd14612 at ...> wrote:
>
 
> I'm at a loss to answer this question with any degree of confidence: Why was such "blind" trust in Peter Pettigrew so firm among James/Sirius/Lupin? Especially since Pettigrew eventually proved to be such a weakling and (so obviously) a RAT? 

Pippin:
Just as Sirius thought Pettigrew would be the perfect choice because he was such a weak wizard that no one would pick him for the important job of secret keeper, Voldemort could see that Peter would be a perfect choice for a spy. 

It was believed, though we don't know on what information, that the spy was very powerful,  Voldemort's second in command. That would explain why Peter was overlooked when suspicion fell on James's friends. 

Sirius made the same mistake with Peter that he would later make with Kreacher -- he never really tried to understand what made Peter tick, he just assumed that Peter would do as he expected.

Pippin



It just doesn't seem plausible to me that a person with such character faults could have been trusted so fully by James and Sirius. And shouldn't Lily have had some say in the decisions about who would be their life-protecting Secret Keeper?
> 
> A little background:
> 
> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67@> wrote:
> > 
> > Carol again:
> <snip> 
> >
> >. . . it *is* a fact (within canon) that Snape thinks Black entered the castle to murder Harry and that Lupin has been helping him all year. That assumption (also made by Dumbledore, Fudge, Mr. Weasley, and everyone else except Sirius Black himself and Pettigrew) would naturally strengthen Snape's view that Black betrayed the Potters to their deaths. 
> > 
> <snip>
> > . . . Snape [has] every reason to believe that Sirius Black betrayed the Potters and no reason to think otherwise . . . 
> >
> <snip>
> >
> >But Dumbledore's efforts to protect Lily (and, of course, James and Harry) were in vain because James Potter trusted Sirius Black and made him the Secret Keeper. That, IMO, is why Snape is so furious at Black and the dead James--if it weren't for James Potter's blind trust in his friend, Lily would still be alive. (In DH, Dumbledore reinforces this belief, saying to the desperately grieving young Snape, "She {Lily] and James put their faith in the wrong person" and comparing their faith in their unworthy Secret Keeper to his own hope that Voldemort would spare Lily (DH Am. ed. 678), a comparison that Snape seems to hear only half of given his subsequent virulent hatred of the man he thinks is Lily's betrayer. In a way, he's right, but, of course, the friend that James trusted was Peter Pettigrew, not Black.
> > 
> <snip> 
> > 
> >
> 
> Frank D again:
> Here is a bit of what I found on searching the list's history:
> 
> >Jan 28, 2008 8:37 pm
> >Message #181103
> 
> Julie wrote: 
> >
> <snip>
> >
> >Given that Sirius treated Ratboy as little more than a sycophantic hanger-on who was lesser in every way than the other three, how could he NOT have suspected such lesser makeup might have included character and courage?
> >
> >Or at least that Ratboy might have some resentment issues over being
> constantly reflected in the limelight of the Golden Duo throughout all their schooldays.
> >
> >As part of said Golden Duo, [James] was pretty dim too. And who in their right mind would refuse *Dumbledore*--one of the greatest
> Wizards who ever lived--as Secret-Keeper, then hand the lives of his family over to reasonably competent at best Ratboy?
> 
> >Truly there should have been more to this whole story than what we got, including why James refused Dumbledore, what Dumbledore knew and why he let Snape go without obliviating him, why Sirius suspected Lupin and vice-versa, etc. But JKR didn't give it to us, so we can only work with what is there. And with our individual opinions and valuations of course ;-)
> 
> >Julie
> 
> Any help toward understanding this would be appreciated.
> 
> Frank D
>





From k12listmomma at comcast.net  Tue May 12 03:09:41 2009
From: k12listmomma at comcast.net (k12listmomma)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 21:09:41 -0600
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Why did Sirius trust Pettigrew? WAS: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal
References: <gua1vv+pe7l@eGroups.com> <gua92e+vfse@eGroups.com> <BAY116-DS5C250598D928DA92AF737A3600@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4ADF5349600E460697DE6579B92F625A@homemain>

No: HPFGUIDX 186563

> jkoney:
> I don't believe he was a DE at the time, because like you said the dark 
> mark
> would have given him away.

Shelley:
I am not so sure the Dark Mark was visible to just anyone. Otherwise, it 
would be EASY to see if anyone was a Voldemort supporter by just demanding 
to see their arm. I get the feeling that it wasn't that simple. We see from 
Crouch Jr's trial and revelations that it took a long time for his dad to 
figure out that his son was involved, and so it wasn't as simple as saying 
"show me your arm".

Philip:
Certainly, like Dumbledore, Voldemort would have been careful to ensure that 
Wormtail was not obviously a Death Eater. I suspect he may have received his 
mark when he was able to betray the Potters. This would seem a suitably 
useful piece of information worthy of such a position. Also as soon as this 
happened, his spying ability was useless. It is of course possible that the 
reason Pettigrew murdered Sirius was to ensure his cover was retained - 
Sirius
would have blown it otherwise.

Shelley:
No, I don't think the Dark Mark gives you away that easily that others could 
just recognize it, since Malfoy was a professional involved in the Hogwarts 
school, and others kept their professional lives in the Ministry of Magic 
all while being Death Eaters or involved with Voldemort. People around them 
had to put together other clues to see if they were suspected of being a 
Voldemort supporter, and if Peter played his role well as friends to James 
and Sirius, I don't think the Dark Mark alone would have given him away. I 
think we see evidence from canon that the first time around, before Lilly 
and James were murdered, that the spies who served Voldemort were 
everywhere, blended into the WW, and that having a Dark Mark didn't just 
give them away.

I get the distinct impression that nature of the Dark Mark changed when 
Voldemort fell- that the spell somehow got corrupted or lost it's powers to 
be fully invisible or stealthy so that even when people were looking for it, 
that it would be hard to find without the secret password or spell to make 
it show. Stupid kids like Draco are so obvious about touching his arm and 
bragging about doing something special, but an adult who was intending to 
keep spying wouldn't be brazen to go showing it off. To spy adequately at 
all, the Dark Mark had to be invisible to the ordinary public; otherwise, as 
a spell it would betray every person whom it was put upon. 




From k12listmomma at comcast.net  Tue May 12 03:18:32 2009
From: k12listmomma at comcast.net (k12listmomma)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 21:18:32 -0600
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Why did Sirius trust Pettigrew? WAS: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal
References: <gua1vv+pe7l@eGroups.com> <gua92e+vfse@eGroups.com> <BAY116-DS5C250598D928DA92AF737A3600@phx.gbl> <4ADF5349600E460697DE6579B92F625A@homemain>
Message-ID: <E8B2AF3E6F3A4873A7137FA59B86CA0F@homemain>

No: HPFGUIDX 186564


> Shelley:
> I get the distinct impression that nature of the Dark Mark changed when
> Voldemort fell- that the spell somehow got corrupted or lost it's powers 
> to
> be fully invisible or stealthy so that even when people were looking for 
> it,
> that it would be hard to find without the secret password or spell to make
> it show. Stupid kids like Draco are so obvious about touching his arm and
> bragging about doing something special, but an adult who was intending to
> keep spying wouldn't be brazen to go showing it off. To spy adequately at
> all, the Dark Mark had to be invisible to the ordinary public; otherwise, 
> as
> a spell it would betray every person whom it was put upon.
>


Replying to my own post, just add some more canon to this line of thought:
Snape and Karkaroff know that Voldemort is growing stronger through their 
Dark Mark. It had grown cold, grown dead when Voldemort lost his powers, and 
when his powers regained, the spell starting regaining it's full effect 
again. It's very possible that when Voldemort became "Vapormort", the spell 
lost it's ability to be stealthy, meaning anyone could see it. But, I doubt 
highly that it was visible to anyone but a Death Eater in the period before 
Voldemort's fall. 




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Tue May 12 03:19:26 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 03:19:26 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gua82t+s6ob@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guapru+506p@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186565


> > I love, love, love Tolkien. But the only moral responsibility for evil that a good guy has in Tolkien is not to seek power above his station. That's fine if you believe in the feudal system, and maybe Tolkien did. But I think JKR is trying to get us to consider that maybe we believe other things now.
> > 
> jkoney:
> I'm not sure what you are saying about Tolkien.
>

Pippin:
Those who reject the ring are able to do so because they want no more power than is theirs by heredity and tradition. And that's all they have to do to prove themselves  -- they don't even have to fight if it's not in their nature. 

There's a sense that everything would be fine if people could just accept their place and their station in life -- which the good characters do.  They  are not responsible in the least for Sauron's existence or his hatred.

You'd never have Gandalf saying of the free folk of the west what Dumbledore says of wizards, that they have mistreated and abused their fellows for too long, and are now reaping their reward.


Pippin





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Tue May 12 05:00:44 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 05:00:44 -0000
Subject: Why did Sirius trust Pettigrew? WAS: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal
In-Reply-To: <E8B2AF3E6F3A4873A7137FA59B86CA0F@homemain>
Message-ID: <guavps+jii8@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186566

Shelley wrote: 
> Replying to my own post, just add some more canon to this line of thought:
> Snape and Karkaroff know that Voldemort is growing stronger through their Dark Mark. It had grown cold, grown dead when Voldemort lost his powers, and when his powers regained, the spell starting regaining it's full effect again. It's very possible that when Voldemort became "Vapormort", the spell lost it's ability to be stealthy, meaning anyone could see it. But, I doubt highly that it was visible to anyone but a Death Eater in the period before Voldemort's fall.

Carol responds:
I agree that we need some explanation for why the Aurors didn't just examine the arms of suspected Death Eaters and round them up, but I don't think it's a spell concealing the Dark Mark from everyone who isn't a Death Eater. For one thing, Snape shows his Dark Mark to Fudge trying to prove to him that Voldemort is back. Fudge recoils in horror as if he's never seen one before (I'll get back to that in a second), but the Dark Mark is clearly visible to him, to Harry, and to everyone in the room. Snape tells Dumbledore that his Dark Mark and Karkaroff's have grown darker now that Voldemort is returning, and he tells Bellatrix that they all knew for that reason that the Dark Lord had returned.

When Voldemort vaporized, in contrast, the Dark Mark--far from losing its power and being visible to anyone--became so faded that the Death Eaters (except for Bellatrix and her cronies, who refused to believe it, and Snape, who knew better) believed that he was dead. (Snape claims that he also thought that the Dark Lord was dead, but he's lying to Bellatrix as he must also have lied to LV.) 

So if the Dark Mark becomes more visible when Voldemort is strong (and actually burns black when he's summoning the Death Eaters) but fades into invisibility, or nearly so, when he's vaporized, why didn't the Aurors check suspected Death Eaters for Dark Marks? Of course, by the time some of them were actually arrested, Voldemort was already vaporized, and later, when Fudge was denying that Voldemort was back, the DEs who got off by claiming the Imperius Curse (after their Dark Marks had faded) went back into society and became respectable citizens, some of them (Malfoy) on the board of governors of Hogwarts, others (e.g., Macnair) working for the MoM.

My theory, and it's just a theory, is based on Fudge's reaction to Snape's Dark Mark. He acts as if he's never seen such a thing before. (Of course, he's seen the Dark Mark in the sky, but, apparently, he's never seen it burned into someone's flesh. Also, Snape says that the DEs used it to identify themselves to each other (as Karkaroff testified, nobody knew who all the DEs were except Voldemort himself). If that's the case, the Dark Mark may have been a secret known only to the Death Eaters (and to Dumbledore, once Snape became his spy). That's the only explanation I can come up with as to why it wasn't easier to identify the Death Eaters.

I still think, though, that Peter Pettigrew wasn't a DE while he was a spy. The suggestion that he was rewarded with a Dark Mark after he betrayed the Potters is a good one. The other possibility is that he received his Dark Mark after he created the horrible baby body for Vapormort. We know that he could wield a wand. He tortured and Legilimensed Bertha Jorkins and then killed her; he also killed the old Muggle, Frank Bryce. If he could do all that, he could certainly give Peter a Dark Mark (the better to keep him in line).

At any rate, that's the best explanation I can come up with, but I wish that JKR had made the operation of the Dark Mark clearer in all respects, not just that one. We don't know exactly how they communicate, but it seems clear that Voldemort can send messages to the DEs as a group or to individual DEs, and perhaps they can send them to each other or to him as well (beyond touching the Dark Mark to summon him). It seems to be somewhere between a dark and silent Patronus and an enchanted coin.

Carol, also wondering how Draco could get complex messages onto something as small as I imagine a galleon to be





From elseajay at earthlink.net  Tue May 12 22:19:42 2009
From: elseajay at earthlink.net (Lois  Jamieson)
Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 15:19:42 -0700
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Humor in Harry Potter
In-Reply-To: <1242118754.1175.38887.m5@yahoogroups.com>
References: <1242118754.1175.38887.m5@yahoogroups.com>
Message-ID: <BF5B1AAD0073474A89C0DB97FDAA4D85@LoisJamiesonPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186567

I'm not British (well, by descent but not by birth) but I completely enjoyed and appreciated all the humor in the books.  I think JKR is a very funny lady and must be a gas to talk to. 

I especially liked her understated humor.  My favorite was in PoA when she was describing the tense atmosphere due to an upcoming Quidditch game, which ended in a nasty incident "in which a 7th-year and a 4th-year wound up in the Hospital wing with leeks growing out of their ears."  Completely understated, came out of nowhere and completely hilarious. 

Elseajay


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]




From eggplant107 at hotmail.com  Mon May 11 21:47:17 2009
From: eggplant107 at hotmail.com (eggplant107)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 21:47:17 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP.
In-Reply-To: <gu57t3+q637@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gua6d5+m0jm@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186568

 "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:

> Carol, who doesn't have access to Britcoms and is still
> somewhat at a loss regarding understated British humor
>(maybe I should look for it in Jane Austen!) 

Nah Jane Austen is bush league, go with the real deal, go with Monty Python; not the TV show go with the movies. Pure brilliance expressed as only the British can! 

JKR has lots of humor in her books, it's interesting that the only other fantasy writer that anybody dares to mention in the same breath as her is Tolkien (OK, Pullman too), and in all the Rings books I can find only one joke, and it stank big time. Now I understand that famous actors motto "Dying is easy but comedy is hard".

By the way why is it that the British as so good at writing fantasy? No American writer even comes close. And I say that as a American.      

 Eggplant 





From happyjoeysmiley at yahoo.com  Wed May 13 05:32:21 2009
From: happyjoeysmiley at yahoo.com (happyjoeysmiley)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 05:32:21 -0000
Subject: Humor in Harry Potter
In-Reply-To: <BF5B1AAD0073474A89C0DB97FDAA4D85@LoisJamiesonPC>
Message-ID: <gudm15+73ol@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186569

elseajay wrote:
> I'm not British (well, by descent but not by birth) but I completely enjoyed and appreciated all the humor in the books.  

[snip]

Joey:

Well, I agree. I think JKR's humour is brilliant and, in fact, is one main reason why I continue to read the books. :-) 

I've quite a few favourites but some of them that come to my mind immediately are (I don't have the exact quotes for some of them):

Harry's description of how Hermione looked determined to prove that she wasn't a dunderhead (in that first class with Snape).
---------

When Harry tells Ron & Hermione about Snape's "sinister desire" to be the Quidditch referee: 
"Don't play," said Hermione at once.
"Say you're ill," said Ron.
"Pretend to break your leg," Hermione suggested.
"Really break your leg," said Ron. 
----------

"Professor Dumbledore - yesterday, when I was having my Divination exam, Professor Trelawney went very - very strange."
"Indeed?" said Dumbledore. "Er - stranger than usual, you mean?" 
----------

"Oh shut up, Weatherby"
----------

Luna's idea of Rotfang conspiracy 
----------

Cheers,
~Joey :-)




From sartoris22 at yahoo.com  Wed May 13 06:32:20 2009
From: sartoris22 at yahoo.com (sartoris22)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 06:32:20 -0000
Subject: Humor in Harry Potter
In-Reply-To: <gudm15+73ol@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gudphk+5r07@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186570

Joey:

Well, I agree. I think JKR's humour is brilliant and, in fact, is one main reason why I continue to read the books. :-) 

sartoris22:

Me too. Your list reminds me of some of my favorite comic moments such as George and Fred mocking Percy by pompously greeting Harry--"Harry! How spiffing to see you." And the scene at the wedding when the twins, Ron, Hermione, and Harry are laughing about Uncle Bilius who "would down a bottle of Firewhiskey, rush onto the dance floor, hoist up his robes and start pulling flowers out of his___" Or when Fleur complains about Mrs. Weasley love of Celestina's music. Or Mr. Weasley's intitial enthusiasm about the boys using the flying car to rescue Harry. When I think about it, a lot of humorous moments occur at the Burrow or are produced by Weasleys such as Charlie saying that his mother will have kittens if she finds out Harry has to fight a dragon for the Triwizard Tournament. Even Percy is comic as he toadies up to power or tries to make himself important as he does when he talks about checking cauldrons for regulation thickness. Rowling is really a deft hand at humor.As Ron might say, bloody brilliant!









From gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk  Wed May 13 06:47:11 2009
From: gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk (Geoff Bannister)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 06:47:11 -0000
Subject: Humour in HP.
In-Reply-To: <gua6d5+m0jm@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gudqdf+cn9g@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186571

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "eggplant107" <eggplant107 at ...> wrote:
>
>  "Carol" <justcarol67@> wrote:
> 
> > Carol, who doesn't have access to Britcoms and is still
> > somewhat at a loss regarding understated British humor
> >(maybe I should look for it in Jane Austen!) 

Eggplant: 
> Nah Jane Austen is bush league, go with the real deal, go with Monty Python; not the TV show go with the movies. Pure brilliance expressed as only the British can! 
 
> JKR has lots of humor in her books, it's interesting that the only other fantasy writer that anybody dares to mention in the same breath as her is Tolkien (OK, Pullman too), and in all the Rings books I can find only one joke, and it stank big time. 

Geoff:
I wonder which joke that was? 

Also, have you missed out on CSL? There are some quite funny moments 
there too.

There is a saying that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - this could 
be restated as "humour...."

I love series which use dry humour and verbal jokes. As examples, "Yes 
Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister" absolutely have me rolling on the floor. 

Some humour, though, which hinges on embarrassment leaves me 
cringing. I find it almost impossible to read (or watch) Harry's first meeting 
with Dobby.

One piece of JKR's armoury of humour which has not been mentioned but 
I have always appreciated is her use of word play in names... There is quite 
a long list but as examples I would cite, in passing,  Diagon Alley. 
Durmstrang, Grimmauld, Knockturn Alley, Kreacher and even the change
of use of words such as Apparition and Disillusion.

I appreciate many of the examples which have been mentioned by others. 
Perhaps I will  add some of my own when I have a little more time - it being 
07:45 here in the UK with the household just getting into gear. My cereal 
and toast is calling!






From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Wed May 13 13:57:05 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 13:57:05 -0000
Subject: Why did Sirius trust Pettigrew? WAS: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal
In-Reply-To: <guavps+jii8@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guejjh+fo17@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186572

> Carol responds:
> I agree that we need some explanation for why the Aurors didn't just examine the arms of suspected Death Eaters and round them up, but I don't think it's a spell concealing the Dark Mark from everyone who isn't a Death Eater. 

Zara:
I have always supposed that Voldemort gave his followers the ability to hide it for brief periods to avoid detection, or else that standard magic could be used for that purpose.

The lack of detailed technical specifications for the Dark Mark has never particularly disturbed me. No use to which we saw it put seemed beyond the capabilities of magic in the Potterverse.

> Carol: 
> Carol, also wondering how Draco could get complex messages onto something as small as I imagine a galleon to be

Zara:
Text messaging? Have you seen the size of some cellphone viewscreens? <bg>




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 13 15:39:21 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 15:39:21 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <gudqdf+cn9g@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guepj9+2tuo@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186573

Geoff wrote:
<snip> 
> Also, have you missed out on CSL? There are some quite funny moments 
> there too.
> 
> There is a saying that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - this could be restated as "humour...."
<snip>
> 
> One piece of JKR's armoury of humour which has not been mentioned but I have always appreciated is her use of word play in names... There is quite a long list but as examples I would cite, in passing,  Diagon Alley. Durmstrang, Grimmauld, Knockturn Alley, Kreacher and even the change of use of words such as Apparition and Disillusion. <snip>

Carol responds:

I agree about humor (American spelling) being in the eye of the beholder, and I think that JKR provides a variety of comic styles for that reason. I also prefer the dry humor and word play (I mentioned griffin door (Gryffindor) knocker as one of my favorites because it's so subtle (and a hint that Dumbledore, like Harry, was a Gryffindor).

Disillusionment Charm has always bothered me, though, because it's backwards. "I have to Disillusion you" is a great line because of the double meaning (though Harry, of course, isn't really being disillusioned), but, IMO, it ought to be used when the spell that "illusions" Harry is removed, not when it's placed on him. Hope that makes sense!

Carol, wondering what CSL is





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Wed May 13 16:38:32 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 16:38:32 -0000
Subject: Why did Sirius trust Pettigrew? WAS: Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal
In-Reply-To: <guavps+jii8@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guet28+4o4p@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186574


> 
> Carol responds:
> I agree that we need some explanation for why the Aurors didn't just examine the arms of suspected Death Eaters and round them up,

Pippin:
We have it. Sirius didn't know about the Dark Mark, so it's pretty obvious that during the first war it was known only to loyal Death Eaters, Severus Snape and Dumbledore. The Aurors probably never got close enough to any marked Death Eaters to discover it. Karkaroff doesn't seem to have revealed the existence of the Dark Mark at his trial though he obviously knew about it. Apparently it had faded so much that it wasn't recognizable any longer.

Snape, Rookwood and Peter Pettigrew never drew any  suspicion on themselves at all while Voldemort was active. AFAWK, Lucius and his cronies only became suspects after Voldemort's fall, when the Death Eaters were in disarray and victims were less afraid to come forward. But even then, they couldn't have pleaded Imperius if most people, unlike Arthur and Dumbledore,could never  bring themselves to believe that such people would have served Voldemort willingly. 

Voldemort picked people who would never be suspected for his marked DE's -- that was the brilliance of it. 
 
I'm sure Snape told Dumbledore about the Dark Mark. But it's the usual dilemma in espionage: the more secret the information, the harder it is to use without compromising its source. If  Dumbledore started finding excuses to examine people's arms, the spy would surely report that to Voldemort, perhaps as his last act before being captured.  Voldemort would then deduce that Snape had revealed the secret. Dumbledore couldn't risk that.

Pippin







From foxmoth at qnet.com  Wed May 13 16:46:37 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 16:46:37 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <gu7be0+qdse@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guethd+e8re@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186575

Alla:
> Here is how I see it. At first Harry sees a teacher punishing a boy who **deserved to be punished** IMO for something wrong that he did. Said teacher used a punishment, which was a bit over the top. He did not use an unforgivable on him, he did not make him bleed, he did not cause him any permanent injury. He caused him a humiliation and probably some pain.<

Pippin:
Hmmm...well, if Harry does not have any problem with that, then we can understand why he didn't have any lasting  problem with the way Snape treated him once he understood that  Snape believed sincerely that Harry deserved to be punished. 

When a sadistic person punishes, he is going to punish sadistically, because he doesn't know what it's like *not* to be sadistic. He has a choice about whether to punish or not, he doesn't have a choice about liking it.

Pippin








From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Wed May 13 16:57:44 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 16:57:44 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guethd+e8re@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gueu68+8l4g@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186576

> Alla:
> > Here is how I see it. At first Harry sees a teacher punishing a boy who **deserved to be punished** IMO for something wrong that he did. Said teacher used a punishment, which was a bit over the top. He did not use an unforgivable on him, he did not make him bleed, he did not cause him any permanent injury. He caused him a humiliation and probably some pain.<
> 
> Pippin:
> Hmmm...well, if Harry does not have any problem with that, then we can understand why he didn't have any lasting  problem with the way Snape treated him once he understood that  Snape believed sincerely that Harry deserved to be punished. 
> 
> When a sadistic person punishes, he is going to punish sadistically, because he doesn't know what it's like *not* to be sadistic. He has a choice about whether to punish or not, he doesn't have a choice about liking it.


Alla:

LOL, so I waited till somebody asks me and what do you think about Snape then, because isn't it the same then, I mean isn't it a double standard when I think that Moody was not a sadist in that scene and that Snape always is?

No, not the same at all to me. Yes, we know that Fake!Moody did not like that DE did not go free, but to me as far as I know he did not have that extensive history that Snape had with James.

Basically in many instances I do not believe that Snape sincerely was convinced that Harry and Harry only and not James' shadow deserved to be punished.

Now before you ask me, yes, if you show me definite evidence that Fake!Moody was punishing Lucius' shadow and now Draco and what he did, yes, I will agree that he was acting sadistically, but still will not agree that there was much for Harry to reevaluate.

JMO,

Alla




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Wed May 13 17:03:04 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 17:03:04 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <gueu68+8l4g@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gueug8+niht@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186577

> Alla:
> <SNIP>
>> Now before you ask me, yes, if you show me definite evidence that Fake!Moody was punishing Lucius' shadow and now Draco and what he did, yes, I will agree that he was acting sadistically, but still will not agree that there was much for Harry to reevaluate.

Alla:

I meant and "not Draco and what he did" of course.




From gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk  Wed May 13 19:23:17 2009
From: gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk (Geoff Bannister)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 19:23:17 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <guepj9+2tuo@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guf6n5+5jbe@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186578

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:

Geoff: 
> > One piece of JKR's armoury of humour which has not been mentioned but I have always appreciated is her use of word play in names... There is quite a long list but as examples I would cite, in passing,  Diagon Alley. Durmstrang, Grimmauld, Knockturn Alley, Kreacher and even the change of use of words such as Apparition and Disillusion. <snip>

Carol:
> Disillusionment Charm has always bothered me, though, because it's backwards. "I have to Disillusion you" is a great line because of the double meaning (though Harry, of course, isn't really being disillusioned), but, IMO, it ought to be used when the spell that "illusions" Harry is removed, not when it's placed on him. Hope that makes sense!

Geoff:
That's not the only "backwards" situation. We have discussed in the 
past the spell "Enervate" which is used to revive those who have been 
subjected to something like a Stupefy.

Enervate is actually defined as "being **drained** of energy".

> Carol, wondering what CSL is

Geoff:
C.S.Lewis.





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 13 19:52:45 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 19:52:45 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guethd+e8re@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guf8ed+4q78@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186579

Alla:
> > Here is how I see it. At first Harry sees a teacher punishing a boy who **deserved to be punished** IMO for something wrong that he did. Said teacher used a punishment, which was a bit over the top. He did not use an unforgivable on him, he did not make him bleed, he did not cause him any permanent injury. He caused him a humiliation and probably some pain.
> 
> Pippin:
> Hmmm...well, if Harry does not have any problem with that, then we can understand why he didn't have any lasting  problem with the way Snape treated him once he understood that Snape believed sincerely that Harry deserved to be punished. 
> 
> When a sadistic person punishes, he is going to punish sadistically, because he doesn't know what it's like *not* to be sadistic. He has a choice about whether to punish or not, he doesn't have a choice about liking it.

Carol responds:
I'm not sure that Snape's punishments qualify as sadistic. He enjoys embarrassing and humiliating certain people (mostly Harry--I don't think he *enjoys* yelling at the incompetent Neville), but his detentions, while no fun at all (they are, after all, supposed to be punishments) are never dangerous or painful. If we compare, saying, sorting rotten Flobberworms from good ones with Umbridge's horrible, blood-drawing quill or the Carrows' Crucios, his detentions seem almost as mild as Lockhart's supposedly enjoyable but actually boring detention in which Harry helps him (IIRC) mail out his autographed photos.

But if you mean that Snape doesn't know what it's like not to be sarcastic and unpleasant to people he dislikes (possibly a defensive mechanism that he developed to keep from feeling "weak"), I might agree with you. He's capable of civility to a few people, notably Dumbledore and Narcissa Malfoy, but he treats Peter Pettigrew and Bellatrix Lestrange with as much contempt and sarcasm as he treats Sirius Black.  Snape, BTW, *can* act and often does, but I think that sarcasm is or has become the milieu in which he feels most comfortable and, perhaps, most in control.

Even if the sadistic teacher you have in mind is Fake!Moody rather than snape, I disagree that he had no control over his sadism. I think he was finding "safe" outlets for it, punishing the son of a Death Eater in front of Gryffindors knowing that they'd think he deserved it and, more important, knowing that they and any teachers who witnessed the bouncing ferret would attribute his malice to the real Moody's known abhorrence of DEs. Imperioing the students (and a spider), Crucioing the spider for longer than necessary to illustrate the curse in front of the very boy whose parents helped torture into insanity with the intention of upsetting him so that he'd need to be invited for tea afterward (all as part of a plot to help Harry win the tournament so that he could be turned over to Voldemort to be killed, and AKing a spider in front of Harry, whose parents had been killed by Voldemort using that same curse--all that is sadism for a purpose combined with self-indulgent sadism disguised as education. (I hate to say it, but Barty Jr. is brilliant. What a sad loss that he became a Death Eater.)

Umbridge, too, keeps her sadism under control most of the time, using it for a purpose (to "teach" Harry not to tell "lies," for example). She considers a Crucio (sadistically trying to figure out which spot would cause the most pain) when she becomes desperate, but even then she's careful to turn Fudge's photograph face down so he won't know what she's doing. Her use of sadistic punishments, like Fake!Moody's, is calculated, not beyond her control.

I do agree, however, that Harry, after encountering real sadism in another teacher (not to mention hearing about the Carrows) found Snape's detentions to be more unpleasant than sadistic, especially when he realized, through the Pensieve memories, that Snape really believed that he deserved them (in some cases, he knew that himself). I'm not so sure, though, that Harry ever recognized Fake!Moody's sadism for what it was. He may actually have thought that, DE or not, the man who put his name in the Goblet of Fire and turned the TWT cup into a portkey to send him to Voldemort and killed his own father and Imperio'd Krum to make him Crucio Cedric really was a good teacher.

I agree with the posters who are saying that Harry never had second thoughts about Draco's being turned into a ferret or any of the other signs that some readers saw that "Moody" was something worse than a paranoid old Auror. In fact, the only evidence he consciously reexamines that I can recall is anything he can think of that "proves" Snape is evil near the end of HBP.

To return to sadism, I think that even Bellatrix, insane as she is and much as she enjoys inflicting torture, can normally control her sadism. The exception appears to be when she's desperate for information, either from the Longbottoms or from Harry and Ron regarding the Sword of Gryffindor (and her vault) when she's torturing Hermione in DH. Even Voldemort controls his sadism when it comes to the Cruciatus Curse, using it either to punish or to force information out of people (though he's starting to fall apart, IMO, in DH). His torture of, say, Bertha Jorkins before killing her is calculated. He enjoys it, but it's not something he can't help doing because of his sadistic nature. (And when Voldemort loses control, it's the Killing Curse, not Crucio, that he "can's help" using.)

Carol, who does agree that Harry had no problem forgiving Snape for his detentions and point docking or even for hating him because those things no longer had any significance once Harry understood Snape




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 13 21:48:40 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 21:48:40 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <gueu68+8l4g@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guff7o+m10f@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186580

Alla wrote:
> 
> LOL, so I waited till somebody asks me and what do you think about Snape then, because isn't it the same then, I mean isn't it a double standard when I think that Moody was not a sadist in that scene and that Snape always is?
> 
> No, not the same at all to me. Yes, we know that Fake!Moody did not like that DE did not go free, but to me as far as I know he did not have that extensive history that Snape had with James.

<snip>

> Now before you ask me, yes, if you show me definite evidence that Fake!Moody was punishing Lucius' shadow and now Draco and what he did, yes, I will agree that he was acting sadistically, but still will not agree that there was much for Harry to reevaluate.

Carol responds:

Leaving Snape out of the discussion since we see him so differently, I just want to look at Fake!Moody himself. First, we do learn later, as you point out, that he hates Death Eaters who ran free (including Snape, who was protected by Dumbledore for reasons which, fortunately for Snape, Crouch!Moody doesn't fully understand, and Lucius Malfoy, who stayed out of Azkaban by pleading the Imperius Curse). It's also clear that he knows exactly who Draco's father is:

"I know your father of old, boy. . . . You tell him Moody's keeping a close eye on his son . . . . you tell him that from me" (206). More brilliant impersonation on Fake!Moody's part, using the real Moody's known dislike of Death Eaters (including those who escaped Azkaban and are posing as respectable citizens) to cover his own hatred of DEs who walked free (and to send a message to Draco and his father that they will perceive as a threat from the real Moody without saying openly that he knows the truth about Malfoy Sr.).

So, yes. It's personal. And, yes, he knew who Draco was when he punished him. But it's also true that this point doesn't come up until Draco has been restored by McGonagall to his own form and starts muttering about "my father" (just as he did more openly with Hagrid in PoA). Since we can't see into Fake!Moody's mind, it's not clear how much of a role, if any, Draco's being Lucius Malfoy's son plays in his punishment.

But I don't think we need to know his motivation to decide for ourselves whether the punishment is sadistic. We all agree, I'm sure, that Umbridge's quill was sadistic regardless of whether she used it on Harry or Lee Jordan and regardless of whether she hated their fathers (which I think we can safely say she did not).

First, Draco's infraction, the one for which Moody punishes him, is (oddly enough, given who he really is) the cowardly act of trying to hex Harry from behind. (Whether the fact that it was Harry and not some other student he was trying to hex played a role in Fake!Moody's reaction, we don't know.) But it seems clear to me that Fake!Moody is overreacting; if the culprit and his intended victim had been, say, a Ravenclaw and a Hufflepuff, he might not have reacted so angrily. It's just possible--and we can't know one way or the other--that he associates Draco's cowardice in this instance with his father's cowardice in not going to Azkaban. (Whether Lucius Malfoy's action was really cowardice or merely self-preservation is beside the point, as is Fake!Moody's own cowardice in the courtroom. I'm talking about Fake!Moody's perception of the two actions as far as they can be determined.)

Fake!Moody has apparently been told that the teachers aren't supposed to use Transfiguration as a punishment. McGonagall clearly considers it not only excessive but apparently uncalled for under any circumstances. She reminds him that they use detention or speak to the student's Head of House.

And it isn't just Transfiguration. When the Transfigured Draco trise to run off with a "terrified squeak," Fake!Moody sends him ten feet into the air and bounces him off the stone floor. As he bounces Draco "higher and higher" and Ferret!Draco "squeal[s] in pain, Fake!Moody says, "I don't like people who attack when their opponent's back's turned. Stinking, scummy, cowardly thing to do." 

Whether this "justification" is his real reason for punishing Draco or only an excuse, he's clearly hurting him, he's insulting him by referring to an action that's probably an everyday occurrence at Hogwarts as "stinking, cowardly, and scummy" (by implication, Draco himself is a "stinking, scummy coward"), and he's openly expressing dislike for him (whether he's giving the real reason or not).

As the ferret flails its tail and legs helplessly in the air, he bounces it again, one bounce per word: "Never--do--that--again."

As McGonagall approaches, he calmly bounces him still higher.

This is the same man who later enjoys the prolonged torture of a spider in front of a boy whose parents he helped torture into insanity.

At any rate, the details that we have--a stone floor; repeated, hard bounces of ten feet or higher; squeals of pain--indicate that it did hurt, probably a great deal. Had Draco been a real ferret, he would not have survived. I think it's safe to call his action sadistic regardless of whether he did it because, in his view, Draco deserved such a severe punishment for a minor and probably common offense or because Draco is the son of a Death Eater who walked free while he himself suffered in Azkaban (loyal, no doubt, in his own view, but more so after his father rescued him than when he was being sentenced along with the Lestranges).

Had he simply done what he does at the end, seizing Draco by the arm and marching him off to see Snape, the punishment would have been entirely appropriate. As it is, it's excessive and prolonged physical punishment. Had the student being punished been Harry or Ron, I suspect that both readers and characters (including McGonagall) would have been outraged by "Moody's" cruelty (especially if it were Harry and the painful, repeated contacts with the stone floor had been presented from his point of view).

At any rate, I don't think we can prove that hatred or resentment of Draco's father played a role in his punishment though I suspect, given his words about Lucius, that it did. But we can prove that he disliked Draco (he said so) and that Draco was both terrified and hurt. That he suffered no broken bones as a magically transformed animal is beside the point. It hurt, "Moody" knew that it hurt, and he seems to have enjoyed the pain he was inflicting.

Carol, deliberately refraining from mentioning Snape so that we can focus on "Moody"
  




From horridporrid03 at yahoo.com  Wed May 13 22:57:57 2009
From: horridporrid03 at yahoo.com (horridporrid03)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 22:57:57 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gu9ln6+pk04@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gufj9l+grt6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186581

> >>Alla:
> <snip>
>Here is how I see it. At first Harry sees a teacher punishing a boy who **deserved to be punished** IMO for something wrong that he did. Said teacher used a punishment, which was a bit over the top. He did not use an unforgivable on him, he did not make him bleed, he did not cause him any permanent injury.
> <snip>

Betsy Hp:
Right.  But it was still over the top, even if just a little.  And Harry never reconsiders it.  It's that lack of thought, that lack of reexamination (hey! just like the title of this cartoon! *g*), that bothers me.  

> >>Alla:
> <snip>
> But that is not my main point, I am certainly not arguing against your right to view it as some horrible thing that Harry must have been reevaluating in his mind. I am saying that I am glad that JKR did not put it up as a definite answer and leave a room for a reader to think both ways.
> <snip>

Betsy Hp:
I'm not asking JKR to *tell* us how to think, I'm pointing out that she doesn't issue us an invitation to think in the first place.  I never said Harry had to come to a specific conclusion after reexamining what Fake!Moody did to Draco.  Perhaps he'd reach a similar conclusion to yours, perhaps he'd not reach a solid conclusion at all.  But just by raising the question the reader would be invited to think things through themselves.

But because no such invitation was made, I don't think JKR left room for the reader to think both ways.  Draco deserved what he got and to think or feel differently is to work against the text.  I don't like it, but I'm not a fan of the series anymore.  (This is *why* I'm not a fan, actually.) 

> >>Pippin:
> But young readers who love a book read it over and over again. OTOH, if they  didn't like the book or were indifferent to it, why would it have any great influence on the way they think?

Betsy Hp:
Even with a reread the author doesn't extend an invitation to rethink this scene. Even with a reread *Harry* doesn't rethink this scene. Without a reread this scene adds its voice (however small) to the unthinking "tooth and claw" side of the zeitgeist.  I think JKR missed an opportunity here.

> >>Carol:
> <snip>
> At any rate, I understand exactly how Betsy feels, especially since I so strongly disapproved of "Moody" even when I thought that he was a good guy. But I agree with Pippin that the reader, at least the alert reader, is supposed to reread GoF from a new perspective. 

Betsy Hp:
Honestly, I don't think we're supposed to reexamine this scene from a new perspective. Unless JKR wants us to feel cleverer than her protagonist, which would surprise me.  I think we're supposed to both like and relate to Harry. And I think both those feelings would be compromised if we feel we got something Harry never does.

> >>Carol:
> I also think it's best that we *don't* have Harry or the narrator going back over events and reevaluating them. It's really
much more satisfactory to do it ourselves, whether we're adults or intelligent children, who really can figure more things out for themselves than many adults give them credit for.

Betsy Hp:
It'd be weird if the narrator did the reevaluation; that would underline just how badly Harry missed things.  But I thought it a mistake to not have Harry re-think things. I'm not asking for a play-by-play, just some thought.  Carol, you pointed out earlier in your post:

> >>Carol:
> <snip>
> And Harry isn't given time to rethink it. By the time he
realizes who "Moody" really is, Barty Jr. has committed much more serious offenses directly involving Harry, including sending him to the graveyard to be murdered. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
But that's why I blame JKR.  She should have *made* time, maybe not the end of GoF, maybe later on in the series, but just some point where Harry reevaluates things.  If JKR was hoping for the *reader* to reexamine and reevaluate she really should have had her protagonist do the same if she wanted him to end the series as someone the reader could still relate to.

> >>Carol:
> <snip> HP isn't an Aesop's fable in which the moral (if any) is openly stated. The books are open to interpretation, and different readers will identify different themes (or none) and arrive at different conclusions about the morality depicted in the books. If  Harry arrived at the "right" conclusions himself, the readers would have no reason to think for themselves. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
I'm neither asking for an overarching moral end nor an Aesop's Fable. I'm asking for Harry to *think*, to think about the very things you're saying JKR wanted her reader thinking about.  Because he doesn't, I don't think JKR reexamines the scene herself.  So I think being bothered by it, thinking Draco really was mistreated, goes against the text.

> >>Betsy Hp:
> > <snip> *I* thought about the implications of Neville being alone in the classroom with the man who tortured his parents to madness at a time when he was emotionally vulnerable. <snip> In fact they go the opposite way and have one of Neville's classmates praise that DE in front of him.
 
> >>Pippin:
> I'm not sure what you're getting at, here. Yes, Neville was manipulated in a very ugly way. But Harry and the readers certainly find out how that feels when Harry thinks that Dumbledore betrayed him. It's  far more immediate to explore the issue that way than to have Harry speculate about Neville's feelings. 

> >>Carol responds:
> I think that Betsy (correct me if I'm wrong, and, BTW, good to see you back!) is responding specifically to GoF. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
I was more thinking about the one time Fake!Moody as a teacher was brought up again, that I could recall.  (And also, hello! *g*) Not so much the whys and wherefores of it, but that the one time it was brought up again it was to praise Fake!Moody. IOWs, it looks to me like JKR *really* has no interest in her readers going back, reexamining the actions taken by a sadistic DeathEater, and contrasting it to how we were encouraged to look at the actions of a "cool" teacher. 

Readers may rethink, but they're going against the text when they do so.  And I honestly think connecting Neville being manipulated by the DE who destroyed his parents (or at least helped) and Harry being "manipulated" by Dumbledore (a version of events I'm not entirely sure the books support) is a stretch. I see nothing in the text that encourages that connection.

> >>jkoney:
> I just don't see Harry looking back and feeling bad about this. Malfoy had just sent a curse at Harry. I see Harry at the time happy that Malfoy got caught and punished. Later on, I see him thinking how ironic that a DE punished a junior DE.

Betsy Hp:
I agree that this is exactly how the text, how JKR, expects her readers to interpret the scene.  Sure it was a little over the top, but it was Draco, who we know deserved it.  Nothing to rethink here.  Per the books at least. :)

It bothers me, but I also know I'm bringing my own stuff into the text.  A *lot* of my own stuff into the text. :D  I liked Draco which I think JKR never saw coming.
 
> >>Betsy_Hp 
> > I will say, I don't recall Harry ever struggling with his own moral awareness.  *That's* what I was missing. 

> >>Pippin:
> But that's an adult thing, and Harry's status as an adult is deliberately ambiguous. It's pointed out that in real world Britain a seventeen year old  is legally a child -- an innocent. 
>  JKR writes the story so that innocents who identify with Harry  can continue to do so, while adults can recognize that Harry couldn't  make the decisions he makes as an adult without knowing that moral failures are a part of being human and that everyone shares some responsibility for the existence of evil in the world. 

Betsy Hp:
But Harry is supposed to be growing up as the books progress.  And I thought you'd said a clever child would reread the books and pick up on the moral issues in this scene (the issues Harry missed)?  Which means that by book end, the young reader no longer identifies with Harry.  They're smarter than him and Harry never catches up.

> >>Betsy Hp:
> > You won't be prevented and, if you're a good guy, you don't have to re-think it if you *do* use it. 

> >>Pippin:
> But that's the point of free will, that no one can force you to accept moral responsibility. 

Betsy Hp:
Okay.  And Harry, by his own free will, refuses moral responsibility.  Again, as a reader, Harry is slipping in my estimation. :D
 
> >>Betsy Hp"
> (I'm old-fashioned in that I see the "mythology of good guys and bad guys" as neither "little" nor strictly "fictional".  There's a lot that's foundational and instructive to real-life issues in those sort of mythologies.  It's why they're still told, I think.)

> >>Pippin:
> I called it a "little fictional mythology" because the people who are seriously dealing with evil in our society don't divide the world into good guys and bad guys. IMO that's not the way that modern philosophy and theologians and human behavior experts talk about evil. 

Betsy Hp:
Neither do the mythologies.  The very good ones (the ones that stick) don't have a sorting hat. ;D

> >>Pippin:
> I love, love, love Tolkien. But the only moral responsibility for evil that a good guy has in Tolkien is not to seek power above his station. That's fine if you believe in the feudal system, and maybe Tolkien did. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
I disagree a lot. :)  So this probably isn't a good example to use for what all the mythologies stand for.

Betsy Hp (this is *waaay* too long, most likely repetitive, but I'm not up for editing, sorry)




From gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk  Wed May 13 06:58:36 2009
From: gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk (Geoff Bannister)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 06:58:36 -0000
Subject: Humor in Harry Potter
In-Reply-To: <gudphk+5r07@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gudr2s+vn6u@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186582

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "sartoris22" <sartoris22 at ...> wrote:
>
Joey:
> Well, I agree. I think JKR's humour is brilliant and, in fact, is one main reason why I continue to read the books. :-) 
> 
sartoris22:
When I think about it, a lot of humorous moments occur at the Burrow or are produced by Weasleys such as Charlie saying that his mother will have kittens if she finds out Harry has to fight a dragon for the Triwizard Tournament. 

Geoff:
That's not particularly funny. Is the phrase "having kittens" unusual where 
you live?

It's a very common expression in the UK when someone is likely to create a 
fuss, get annoyed or concerned or disagree with the suggestion..... and it's 
not usually used in a funny sense.





From happyjoeysmiley at yahoo.com  Wed May 13 12:34:57 2009
From: happyjoeysmiley at yahoo.com (happyjoeysmiley)
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 12:34:57 -0000
Subject: Humor in Harry Potter
In-Reply-To: <gudphk+5r07@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gueeph+bnak@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186583

> Joey:
> 
> Well, I agree. I think JKR's humour is brilliant and, in fact, is one main reason why I continue to read the books. :-) 
> 
> sartoris22:
> 
> Me too. Your list reminds me of some of my favorite comic moments such as George and Fred mocking Percy by pompously greeting Harry--"Harry! How spiffing to see you." 
[snip]
Or Mr. Weasley's intitial enthusiasm about the boys using the flying car to rescue Harry. 
[snip]
Even Percy is comic as he toadies up to power or tries to make himself important as he does when he talks about checking cauldrons for regulation thickness. 

Joey:

My favourites too! :-)

Another one that came to my mind:

* Madam Pomfrey telling Harry to remain in bed after an accident in Quidditch because killing McLaggen would come "under the category of over-exertion" [HBP, I think]

> sartoris22:
Rowling is really a deft hand at humor.As Ron might say, bloody brilliant!

Joey:

:-)

I also like the way she describes some human emotions or traits using a humourous approach. Some examples that come to my mind at the moment (not quoted as-is): 

* When Lockhart says they can ask Snape to whip up a love potion, Snape looked as though anyone who asks him for a love potion would be force-fed poison.

* Draco Malfoy can make Dudley look like a kind, sensitive boy.

* It was remarkable that he (Lockhart) showed all his teeth even he wasn't talking

* Harry thinking that Luna has a "permanently surprised look" on her face because of the shape (?) of her eyebrows

* Harry saying "Wangobalwime" to Cho when he tries to ask her out for the first time (GoF)

Cheers,
~Joey :-)




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Thu May 14 02:36:27 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 02:36:27 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gufj9l+grt6@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gug03b+e06o@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186584

Carol earlier:
> > <snip>
> > And Harry isn't given time to rethink it. By the time he
> realizes who "Moody" really is, Barty Jr. has committed much more serious offenses directly involving Harry, including sending him to the graveyard to be murdered. <snip>
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> But that's why I blame JKR.  She should have *made* time, maybe not the end of GoF, maybe later on in the series, but just some point where Harry reevaluates things.  If JKR was hoping for the *reader* to reexamine and reevaluate she really should have had her protagonist do the same if she wanted him to end the series as someone the reader could still relate to.
>

Carol again:
I've probably snipped too much here, but maybe this part will be sufficient. I think you're forgetting the traumatic events that Harry went through, first in the graveyard and then with "Moody" when he returns. We hear Crouch Jr. telling his story; we see him actually trying to kill Harry. My first thought was, What! *Moody* put Harry's name in the Goblet of Fire? I never liked him, but I didn't think he was trying to kill Harry! But then we learn that "Moody" is a DE and an imposter who, among other things, killed his own father and placed Krum under the Imperius Curse so he'd torture Cedric Diggory. Harry sits there in shock as Crouch Jr. recounts his story. Then he sees a Dementor suck Barty Jr's soul. Then he has to recount his own story of the horrors in the graveyard, including the return of Voldemort and the murder of Cedric Diggory. It's really no wonder that he's not rethinking something as seemingly small as the bouncing ferret or the Crucio'd spider. The next time we see him, he's not only having nightmares about Cedric, he's being called a liar by the Daily Prophet and suffering all the trauma of OoP.

The reader, OTOH, will probably react in surprise or shock (did anyone really suspect that "Moody" was Barty Jr.?) and then go back, as a lot of us did with PoA, to find the clues that we missed (because Harry missed them). Those clues include the bouncing ferret and the lesson with the Unforgiveable Curses.

Harry, admittedly, never rethinks the incidents involving Barty Jr., but I think that's partly because he's only fourteen going on fifteen and not a great judge of character, and partly because he knows the truth about the now soul-sucked Barty and has no reason to be concerned with him again (except to briefly get over the shock of seeing the real Moody, whom JKR takes care to have Moody refer to as "that scum").

It doesn't bother me that Harry never thinks about Barty Jr's role in getting him to the graveyard since, as I said, Barty has confessed his own guilt and is now no threat to anybody. It does, however, bother me that Harry keeps saying that Voldemort murdered Cedric Diggory when in fact it was Wormtail who did it. Voldemort at that point was a (nearly) helpless and at the moment wandless Baby!Thing. I can't help thinking that if Harry would just explain a few details to the likes of Fudge and Zacharias Smith (maybe not specifically identifying the DE as a supposedly dead rat Animagus but at least pointing out that Voldemort had an accomplice and was restored to his body by a potion and an incantation) that someone might actually have believed him.

But Barty? We know he's evil, and if go back and reread the book, we'll see his other doings in that light--a very clever use of the real Moody's idiosyncracies, phrases, paranoia for his own uses, and especially adapting Moody's hatred of DEs to fit his own hatred of DEs who "walked free." The careful reader will see these things. The careless reader won't, but no one is going to think that the "Moody" of GoF is a good guy. Nor, I think, will anyone see his helping Harry or giving Neville tea and a Herbology book as acts of kindness. It was all a lie, all a disguise, all a plot to get Harry to Voldemort.

> Betsy Hp:
> I'm neither asking for an overarching moral end nor an Aesop's Fable. I'm asking for Harry to *think*, to think about the very things you're saying JKR wanted her reader thinking about.  Because he doesn't, I don't think JKR reexamines the scene herself.  So I think being bothered by it, thinking Draco really was mistreated, goes against the text.

Carol:
But, as I said, Harry is not a good judge of character and he doesn't have time or reason to think about Crouch Jr. once he's been exposed and soul-sucked. It's the opposite of what happened with Sirius Black in PoA. Now that he's been revealed as a good guy and James Potter's true friend, not the traitor who brought about Harry's parents' death, Harry doesn't give his former actions--slashing the Fat Lady's portrait and Ron's bedcurtains; dragging Ron by the leg into the Shrieking Shack a second thought. As for the so-called Prank, he knows next to nothing about it but automatically takes the Maruader's view of the matter.

Harry's judging these two characters by appearances prepares us for the small revelations involving two other characters he judges in the same way, Kreacher and Regulus Black, and for the big revelation involving a character he's misjudged throughout the series (and who, I realize, has also misjudged him), Severus Snape.

We see all of these characters either from the outside of, through the unreliable narrator, from Harry's perspective. In fact, the narrator is unreliable (in some, not all, matters) *because* he sees from Harry's flawed and incomplete perspective.

Harry does see a bit more clearly with each book. IMO. By DH, he's even starting to empathize with Mrs. Weasley (much more than Ron does). He's added Neville and Luna to the list of characters that he's stopped judging by appearances and started to see as people.

By the end of the series, we can finally add Snape and Dumbledore to the list. (They may be dead, but they're still important.)

Barty Jr., admittedly, is not included, but he doesn't need to be. From the moment he tells Harry, "I put your name in the Goblet of Fire," it's clear that he's not a good guy and that neither Harry nor the reader has seen him as he really is because JKR and her unreliable narrator have quite brilliantly tricked us as Harry himself was tricked.

Carol, who thinks that Draco's squeals of pain speak for themselves in a rereading of the bouncing ferret scene





From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Thu May 14 02:44:34 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 02:44:34 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP.
In-Reply-To: <gua6d5+m0jm@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gug0ii+m4pe@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186585

"eggplant107" <eggplant107 at ...> wrote:
>
>  "Carol" <justcarol67@> wrote:
> 
> > Carol, who doesn't have access to Britcoms and is still
> > somewhat at a loss regarding understated British humor
> >(maybe I should look for it in Jane Austen!) 
>

Eggplant replies:
 
> Nah Jane Austen is bush league, go with the real deal, go with Monty Python; not the TV show go with the movies. Pure brilliance expressed as only the British can! 
Steve replies:

I disagree that the Monty Python movies are far superior to the tv show episodes. The movies are great, but without the popularity of the tv shows there would have been no demand or market for the movies. The skits in the tv shows are I agree Pure brilliance. I'm not sure about the "as only the British can" claim, but I do agree that British humor is unique and hilarious in ways more suble and clever than much American humor.
> 

Eggplant continues:

> JKR has lots of humor in her books, it's interesting that the only other fantasy writer that anybody dares to mention in the same breath as her is Tolkien (OK, Pullman too), and in all the Rings books I can find only one joke, and it stank big time. Now I understand that famous actors motto "Dying is easy but comedy is hard".
> 

Steve replies:

I dare to mention several fantasy writers, most American, in the same breath as JKR? when it comes to humor and when it comes to serious fantasy novels. L. Frank Baum's Oz books are classic fantasy novels w/ wonderful humor.  Ruth Plumly Thompson carried on with the Oz books after Baum and she is delightfully humorous as well. NY Times best selling author David Eddings' Belgariad and Mallorean series are extremely popular fantasy novels with a great deal of humor in them. Terry Pratchett has an amazing following w/ his very silly and funny Discworld books. Piers Anthony (from Florida) is one of the most prolific, funniest and punniest writers ever and his Xanth fantasy novels have been extremely popular best sellers for a couple of decades at least.  Terry Brooks is one of the most respected and top selling authors ever. His NY Times bestselling Shannara series will soon become movies and are very close to Tolkien in scope and style.  His popular Landover series is also quite funny at times. Terry Goodkind's NY Times Bestselling Sword of Truth series is the source of the top rated Legend of the Seeker tv series and has great humor as well. George R. R. Martin's NY Times bestselling Song of Ice and Fire series will soon be dramatized on HBO and has also a great deal of humor. Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlance novels are also bestselling novels w/ wonderfully clever and funny characters. These and of course C. S. Lewis are just a few examples. I could list many more. And while I like Phillip Pullman, I don't consider him nearly as talented as most of the above authors, and certainly not to be mentioned in the same breath as JKR and Tolkien.

Eggplant continues:

> By the way why is it that the British as so good at writing fantasy? No American writer even comes close. And I say that as a American.      
>  Eggplant

Steve concludes:

I disagree completely with the claim that no American writer even comes close to being as good as the British in writing fantasy. Besides the authors I mentioned earlier, there are also Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time series), Robert E. Howard, Robin Hobb, Robert Vardeman, Lin Carter, L. Sprague De Camp, Poul Anderson, David Brin, David Farland, R. A. Salvatore, Mercedes Lackey, Christopher Stasheff, Janny Wurts, and Raymond Feist. As beloved and fantastically popular authors as JKR and Tolkien are, Great Britain doesn't have a corner on the market of great fantasy fiction. However, in the case of JKR, they do have a corner on a fabulously wealthy one. 




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Thu May 14 12:04:43 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 12:04:43 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guethd+e8re@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guh1cr+stt7@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186586

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
>
> Alla:
> > Here is how I see it. At first Harry sees a teacher punishing a boy who **deserved to be punished** IMO for something wrong that he did. Said teacher used a punishment, which was a bit over the top. He did not use an unforgivable on him, he did not make him bleed, he did not cause him any permanent injury. He caused him a humiliation and probably some pain.<
> 
> Pippin:
> Hmmm...well, if Harry does not have any problem with that, then we can understand why he didn't have any lasting  problem with the way Snape treated him once he understood that  Snape believed sincerely that Harry deserved to be punished. 
> 
> When a sadistic person punishes, he is going to punish sadistically, because he doesn't know what it's like *not* to be sadistic. He has a choice about whether to punish or not, he doesn't have a choice about liking it.
> 
> Pippin

So does Harry's using torture to punish Amicus Carrow and apparently liking it mean that he's a sadistic person? Or is he not a sadistic person because he knows what it's like *not* to be sadistic? Then again, if he has a choice about liking it and chooses to like it anyway, wouldn't it make the whole thing even worse? Wouldn't it mean that he chooses to be something the person he's punishing has no choice but being, i.e. a sadistic person? 
a_svirn





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Thu May 14 16:53:43 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 16:53:43 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gufj9l+grt6@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guhian+mnla@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186587

 
> Betsy Hp:
> I'm not asking JKR to *tell* us how to think, I'm pointing out that she doesn't issue us an invitation to think in the first place.  I never said Harry had to come to a specific conclusion after reexamining what Fake!Moody did to Draco.  Perhaps he'd reach a similar conclusion to yours, perhaps he'd not reach a solid conclusion at all.  But just by raising the question the reader would be invited to think things through themselves.

Pippin:
What we're invited to think through is the larger question of valuing mercy over vengeance, of choosing love over hate.

At the beginning of OOP, Harry considers using transfiguration as an outlet for "fourteen year's hatred of Dudley pounding in his veins" and the only thing really stopping him is the knowledge that he'd be expelled "from that freak school" -- it's certainly not mercy for Dudley. But later Harry shows that he does value forgiveness over vengeance, and the reader is invited to consider that. Harry accepts the hand that Dudley holds out to him in DH. 

Certainly we're not working against the text  when we see that no matter what Draco, Crabbe and Goyle have done, even attempting murder, Harry doesn't think they deserve to die in flames. 
Ron, OTOH, is not about to be sorry that Crabbe is dead. But then he's always been more cruel than Harry, and the reader is invited to feel a bit superior to Ron for that.

> 
> Betsy Hp:
> But Harry is supposed to be growing up as the books progress.  And I thought you'd said a clever child would reread the books and pick up on the moral issues in this scene (the issues Harry missed)?  Which means that by book end, the young reader no longer identifies with Harry.  They're smarter than him and Harry never catches up.

Pippin:
Harry doesn't just ignore the idea that people grow in moral awareness, he angrily denies it. He rejects the notion that young James and young Dumbledore weren't grown up enough to realize that what they were doing was wrong. He feels that he has a trustworthy moral sense and they should have had one too. He isn't ready to confront the idea that his own moral awareness might change, and that he isn't as morally capable now as he will become.

I think JKR knows that a lot of her readers would react the same way to the suggestion that their moral sense is not yet mature, so she doesn't try to force feed it to them. She deals with it obliquely. Readers who know, because they've already experienced it, that moral awareness can increase with maturity can see this happening to Harry, while a reader who isn't ready for that idea doesn't have to cope with it. 

Children's books, said Tolkien, should be like their clothes, and allow for growth.

It's like the way JKR treats Harry's sexual awareness. Personally, I could do without the chest monster, and I'd have more fun with an unexpurgated view of Harry's thoughts. But I certainly wouldn't assume that I'm working against the text to think that Harry's thoughts were a bit (okay, a lot) racier than JKR portrays. 

But there's a limit to what younger readers can deal with. The sexually aware reader is going to be ahead of Harry, and stay ahead of Harry at least in terms of what the text is explicit about. But we can assume that happily married Harry has caught up.

> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Okay.  And Harry, by his own free will, refuses moral responsibility.  Again, as a reader, Harry is slipping in my estimation. :D

Pippin:
He isn't refusing moral responsibility, he's learning that it's something people have to grow into. Which is why he doesn't force it on young Albus. If Albus thinks he has to be in the "good" house to  be good, well, that's why we don't put eleven year old kids in charge of things. :)

Pippin





From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Thu May 14 17:35:09 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 17:35:09 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guh1cr+stt7@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guhkod+pj1j@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186588

Steve replies:
>
Harry cast the spell to punish Amicus for what Amicus was doing to Minerva.  Where in canon does it say Harry cast the spell as sadistic torture or that he enjoyed casting the spell in a manner that would indicate he was a sadistic person?  I don't see Harry Potter as sadistic.  

> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth@> wrote:
> >
> > Alla:
> > > Here is how I see it. At first Harry sees a teacher punishing a boy who **deserved to be punished** IMO for something wrong that he did. Said teacher used a punishment, which was a bit over the top. He did not use an unforgivable on him, he did not make him bleed, he did not cause him any permanent injury. He caused him a humiliation and probably some pain.<
> > 
> > Pippin:
> > Hmmm...well, if Harry does not have any problem with that, then we can understand why he didn't have any lasting  problem with the way Snape treated him once he understood that  Snape believed sincerely that Harry deserved to be punished. 
> > 
> > When a sadistic person punishes, he is going to punish sadistically, because he doesn't know what it's like *not* to be sadistic. He has a choice about whether to punish or not, he doesn't have a choice about liking it.
> > 
> > Pippin
> 
> So does Harry's using torture to punish Amicus Carrow and apparently liking it mean that he's a sadistic person? Or is he not a sadistic person because he knows what it's like *not* to be sadistic? Then again, if he has a choice about liking it and chooses to like it anyway, wouldn't it make the whole thing even worse? Wouldn't it mean that he chooses to be something the person he's punishing has no choice but being, i.e. a sadistic person? 
> a_svirn
>





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Thu May 14 19:25:46 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 19:25:46 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guhkod+pj1j@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guhr7q+jleu@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186589


> Steve replies:
> >
> Harry cast the spell to punish Amicus for what Amicus was doing to Minerva.  Where in canon does it say Harry cast the spell as sadistic torture or that he enjoyed casting the spell in a manner that would indicate he was a sadistic person?  I don't see Harry Potter as sadistic.  

Pippin:
"You really need to want to cause pain -- to enjoy it--righteous anger won't hurt me for long" (Bellatrix Lestrange, OOP ch 36) I don't see Harry as a sadistic person generally. But he was feeling sadistic at that moment, or he couldn't have cast that spell. 

Pippin




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Thu May 14 19:41:29 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 19:41:29 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guhkod+pj1j@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guhs59+qk8n@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186590

Steve wrote:
> >
> Harry cast the spell to punish Amicus for what Amicus was doing to Minerva.  Where in canon does it say Harry cast the spell as sadistic torture or that he enjoyed casting the spell in a manner that would indicate he was a sadistic person?  I don't see Harry Potter as sadistic.  

Carol responds:
I don't think that anyone is arguing that Harry is a sadistic person, only that he had a sadistic moment that we don't see him regret.

As for canon that the spell is a form of torture, we've already provided it by providing the spell's etymology and quoting what Harry feels when it's used on him.

Here are a couple more quotes, both from OoP. First, with regard to the supposed "weapon" that Voldemort is developing:

"'He's got the Cruciatus Curse for causing pain,' said Harry. 'He doesn't need anything more efficient than that" (Am ed. 100).

Second, with regard to enjoyment, testimony from the arch sadist herself:

"'Never used an Unforgiveable Curse before, have you, boy?' [Bellatrix] yelled. <snip commentary> 'You need to *mean* them, Potter! You need to really want to cause pain--to enjoy it--righteous anger won't hurt me for long" (810).

All of which goes to say that Harry's successful Crucio of Amycus, which ended only because Amycus was knocked unconscious, was not the result of righteous anger. Harry succeeded because he really wanted to cause pain (exactly how excruciating that pain was, he knew from experience) and because he enjoyed causing Amycus pain.

For that moment, which I'm happy to say is not repeated, Harry is indulging in sadism (as well as revenge; I'm pretty sure that he's scapegoating Amycus by targeting all his rage at Snape and Voldemort and the DEs in general on one man who, for the moment, represents them all). It's interesting that Harry recalls part of Bellatrix's little speech, the part about having to mean the Crucio to cast it successfully. In other words, he's admitting right there in the text that he *meant* to cause Amycus the excruciating pain that he himself has felt at least three times and witnessed even more frequently. But he's not admitting, perhaps not remembering, that you can't cast a Crucio when your only motivation is righteous wrath. And he's not admitting, or not remembering, that you have to enjoy inflicting pain to cast a successful Crucio.

JKR has Harry recall Bellatrix's words, or part of them. I think we're also supposed to remember the scene itself and the rest of her words, or, perhaps, to go back and check them to see whether Harry is remembering them accurately. (I don't know about you, but I was almost as disturbed by having him quote Bellatrix approvingly as the person who taught him how to cast an Unforgiveable Curse as by his casting it.)

Just possibly the awareness that he, Harry, has enough evil within himself to cast such a spell is sufficient to make him reject the Elder Wand (even with the soul bit no longer exerting its malign influence).

Whether that's true or not, canon clearly shows that a Crucio is torture and that you have to enjoy inflicting pain, at least on a particular person at a particular time, to cast one successfully.

Again, I'm not saying that Harry is a sadist. I'm saying that, under the extreme pressure of Voldemort's impending arrival, he had a sadistic moment. It would be absurd to compare him with Umbridge or Barty Crouch, much less Bellatrix or Voldemort, and say that he's as much of a sadist as they are. Most of the time, even when he's angry, he's motivated by righteous anger or something resembling it. But, in this instance, for this one moment, there's no distinction between him and Bellatrix except for the excuse that he gives for indulging his desire to inflict pain, the reason that McGonagall, herself wildly mistaken IMO, labels as "gallant."

Carol, hoping that Harry will not look back with pride on that moment




From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Thu May 14 20:38:24 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 20:38:24 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guhs59+qk8n@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guhvg0+t9d2@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186591

> Steve wrote:
> > >
> > Harry cast the spell to punish Amicus for what Amicus was doing to Minerva.  Where in canon does it say Harry cast the spell as sadistic torture or that he enjoyed casting the spell in a manner that would indicate he was a sadistic person?  I don't see Harry Potter as sadistic.  
> 
> Carol responds:
> I don't think that anyone is arguing that Harry is a sadistic person, only that he had a sadistic moment that we don't see him regret.
> 
> As for canon that the spell is a form of torture, we've already provided it by providing the spell's etymology and quoting what Harry feels when it's used on him.
> 
> Here are a couple more quotes, both from OoP. First, with regard to the supposed "weapon" that Voldemort is developing:
> 
> "'He's got the Cruciatus Curse for causing pain,' said Harry. 'He doesn't need anything more efficient than that" (Am ed. 100).
> 
> Second, with regard to enjoyment, testimony from the arch sadist herself:
> 
> "'Never used an Unforgiveable Curse before, have you, boy?' [Bellatrix] yelled. <snip commentary> 'You need to *mean* them, Potter! You need to really want to cause pain--to enjoy it--righteous anger won't hurt me for long" (810).
> 
> All of which goes to say that Harry's successful Crucio of Amycus, which ended only because Amycus was knocked unconscious, was not the result of righteous anger. Harry succeeded because he really wanted to cause pain (exactly how excruciating that pain was, he knew from experience) and because he enjoyed causing Amycus pain.
> 
> For that moment, which I'm happy to say is not repeated, Harry is indulging in sadism (as well as revenge; I'm pretty sure that he's scapegoating Amycus by targeting all his rage at Snape and Voldemort and the DEs in general on one man who, for the moment, represents them all). It's interesting that Harry recalls part of Bellatrix's little speech, the part about having to mean the Crucio to cast it successfully. In other words, he's admitting right there in the text that he *meant* to cause Amycus the excruciating pain that he himself has felt at least three times and witnessed even more frequently. But he's not admitting, perhaps not remembering, that you can't cast a Crucio when your only motivation is righteous wrath. And he's not admitting, or not remembering, that you have to enjoy inflicting pain to cast a successful Crucio.
> 
> JKR has Harry recall Bellatrix's words, or part of them. I think we're also supposed to remember the scene itself and the rest of her words, or, perhaps, to go back and check them to see whether Harry is remembering them accurately. (I don't know about you, but I was almost as disturbed by having him quote Bellatrix approvingly as the person who taught him how to cast an Unforgiveable Curse as by his casting it.)
> 
> Just possibly the awareness that he, Harry, has enough evil within himself to cast such a spell is sufficient to make him reject the Elder Wand (even with the soul bit no longer exerting its malign influence).
> 
> Whether that's true or not, canon clearly shows that a Crucio is torture and that you have to enjoy inflicting pain, at least on a particular person at a particular time, to cast one successfully.
> 
> Again, I'm not saying that Harry is a sadist. I'm saying that, under the extreme pressure of Voldemort's impending arrival, he had a sadistic moment. It would be absurd to compare him with Umbridge or Barty Crouch, much less Bellatrix or Voldemort, and say that he's as much of a sadist as they are. Most of the time, even when he's angry, he's motivated by righteous anger or something resembling it. But, in this instance, for this one moment, there's no distinction between him and Bellatrix except for the excuse that he gives for indulging his desire to inflict pain, the reason that McGonagall, herself wildly mistaken IMO, labels as "gallant."
> 
> Carol, hoping that Harry will not look back with pride on that moment
>
Steve responds:

That makes sense to me.  I can buy him having a moment where he meant to inflict pain, thereby assuring that the spell would work. I just don't think of him as being a sadistic person in general, based on a specific event of intentionally wanting to inflict pain. And didn't the spell last a few seconds? If Harry had stood there over his body laughing maniacally for minutes, then I'd have been more apt to think of him as sadistic. Him quoting Bellatrix didn't bother me too much.  We often remember things said by people we really hate or are scared of w/o necessarily agreeing w/ that person's motivations or reasons for saying these things.  I would have rather he'd remembered Lupin or someone else, that's true, but at least he remembered it.  I no longer believe Harry's reasons for casting the spell were chivalrous, or that McGonagall's label of what Harry did as being gallant was justified or accurate.  Chivalrous behavior in my understanding at least wouldn't involve intentionally wishing to inflict pain on someone, especially once they were incapacitated, and certainly not act sadistically toward someone. I may be wrong, but generally speaking, knights weren't big into torture were they? 





From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Thu May 14 21:02:09 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 21:02:09 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guhs59+qk8n@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gui0sh+o4bh@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186592

> Steve wrote:
> > >
> > Harry cast the spell to punish Amicus for what Amicus was doing to Minerva.  Where in canon does it say Harry cast the spell as sadistic torture or that he enjoyed casting the spell in a manner that would indicate he was a sadistic person?  I don't see Harry Potter as sadistic.  
> 
> Carol responds:
> I don't think that anyone is arguing that Harry is a sadistic person, only that he had a sadistic moment that we don't see him regret.

<snip> 
> Again, I'm not saying that Harry is a sadist. I'm saying that, under the extreme pressure of Voldemort's impending arrival, he had a sadistic moment. It would be absurd to compare him with Umbridge or Barty Crouch, much less Bellatrix or Voldemort, and say that he's as much of a sadist as they are. <snip>

a_svirn:
Which is precisely why no one agues it. I agree with pretty much everything you've said, and I only picked on Pippin's thought that a sadistic person punishes sadistically because it leads to further questions, i.e. does a non-sadistic person punishes non-sadistically? Simply by virtue of him or her being non-sadistic? And if a non-sadistic person does on occasion punish sadistically, where does it leave us? 

I feel uncomfortable with this sort of divorcing a person's actions from his or her, well, nature, I guess. That's exactly why I, for example, cannot buy Dumbledore's asserting that Draco's not only "not a killer at heart", but even somehow `innocent' even though he demonstrably is not innocent. He's innocent; we are invited to believe, because of his inner qualities. It doesn't matter what he does ? at heart he's "not a killer". Of course it's true only to a point ? if he kills by his own hand his inner qualities would change. From which fate he is saved by Snape whose soul Dumbledore is willing to risk for whatever reason.  

Honestly I'd take a murderer at heart who abides the law in practice over an innocent at heart who's running all over the place plotting and executing murders with various degrees of success any day. I also think that when a non-sadistic person like Harry indulges in sadism --it's just plain wrong. It feels even worse somehow than when a sadistic person does it. Precisely because Harry can restrain himself, but chooses not to. And because it rather blurs the line between those two types of persons, if only momentarily. What baffles me is that no one in the series apparently thinks so. 


> Carol, hoping that Harry will not look back with pride on that moment

a_svirn, rather doubting that Harry will spare it a thought.





From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Thu May 14 22:41:42 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 22:41:42 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guhvg0+t9d2@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gui6n6+t6fm@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186593

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "mesmer44" <winterfell7 at ...> wrote:
>
 > Carol responds:
> > I don't think that anyone is arguing that Harry is a sadistic person, only that he had a sadistic moment that we don't see him regret.
> > 
> > As for canon that the spell is a form of torture, we've already provided it by providing the spell's etymology and quoting what Harry feels when it's used on him.
> > 
> > Here are a couple more quotes, both from OoP. First, with regard to the supposed "weapon" that Voldemort is developing:
> > 
> > "'He's got the Cruciatus Curse for causing pain,' said Harry. 'He doesn't need anything more efficient than that" (Am ed. 100).
> > 
> > Second, with regard to enjoyment, testimony from the arch sadist herself:
> > 
> > "'Never used an Unforgiveable Curse before, have you, boy?' [Bellatrix] yelled. <snip commentary> 'You need to *mean* them, Potter! You need to really want to cause pain--to enjoy it--righteous anger won't hurt me for long" (810).
> > 
> > All of which goes to say that Harry's successful Crucio of Amycus, which ended only because Amycus was knocked unconscious, was not the result of righteous anger. Harry succeeded because he really wanted to cause pain (exactly how excruciating that pain was, he knew from experience) and because he enjoyed causing Amycus pain.
> > 
> > For that moment, which I'm happy to say is not repeated, Harry is indulging in sadism (as well as revenge; I'm pretty sure that he's scapegoating Amycus by targeting all his rage at Snape and Voldemort and the DEs in general on one man who, for the moment, represents them all). It's interesting that Harry recalls part of Bellatrix's little speech, the part about having to mean the Crucio to cast it successfully. In other words, he's admitting right there in the text that he *meant* to cause Amycus the excruciating pain that he himself has felt at least three times and witnessed even more frequently. But he's not admitting, perhaps not remembering, that you can't cast a Crucio when your only motivation is righteous wrath. And he's not admitting, or not remembering, that you have to enjoy inflicting pain to cast a successful Crucio.
> > 
> > JKR has Harry recall Bellatrix's words, or part of them. I think we're also supposed to remember the scene itself and the rest of her words, or, perhaps, to go back and check them to see whether Harry is remembering them accurately. (I don't know about you, but I was almost as disturbed by having him quote Bellatrix approvingly as the person who taught him how to cast an Unforgiveable Curse as by his casting it.)
> > 
> > Just possibly the awareness that he, Harry, has enough evil within himself to cast such a spell is sufficient to make him reject the Elder Wand (even with the soul bit no longer exerting its malign influence).
> > 
> > Whether that's true or not, canon clearly shows that a Crucio is torture and that you have to enjoy inflicting pain, at least on a particular person at a particular time, to cast one successfully.
> > 
> > Again, I'm not saying that Harry is a sadist. I'm saying that, under the extreme pressure of Voldemort's impending arrival, he had a sadistic moment. It would be absurd to compare him with Umbridge or Barty Crouch, much less Bellatrix or Voldemort, and say that he's as much of a sadist as they are. Most of the time, even when he's angry, he's motivated by righteous anger or something resembling it. But, in this instance, for this one moment, there's no distinction between him and Bellatrix except for the excuse that he gives for indulging his desire to inflict pain, the reason that McGonagall, herself wildly mistaken IMO, labels as "gallant."
> > 
> > Carol, hoping that Harry will not look back with pride on that moment
> >
> Steve responds:
> 
> That makes sense to me.  I can buy him having a moment where he meant to inflict pain, thereby assuring that the spell would work. I just don't think of him as being a sadistic person in general, based on a specific event of intentionally wanting to inflict pain. And didn't the spell last a few seconds? If Harry had stood there over his body laughing maniacally for minutes, then I'd have been more apt to think of him as sadistic. Him quoting Bellatrix didn't bother me too much.  We often remember things said by people we really hate or are scared of w/o necessarily agreeing w/ that person's motivations or reasons for saying these things.  I would have rather he'd remembered Lupin or someone else, that's true, but at least he remembered it.  I no longer believe Harry's reasons for casting the spell were chivalrous, or that McGonagall's label of what Harry did as being gallant was justified or accurate.  Chivalrous behavior in my understanding at least wouldn't involve intentionally wishing to inflict pain on someone, especially once they were incapacitated, and certainly not act sadistically toward someone. I may be wrong, but generally speaking, knights weren't big into torture were they?
>

jkoney:
I agree with Steve, although I never thought it was supposed to be a chivalrous act.

The spitting was just the straw that broke the camels back. What Harry wanted was pay-back. This was the guy who hit him with the curse at the end of HBP. Harry just found out he was the one abusing the students. We can add in the rest of Harry's day that I mentioned way up thread.

So Harry was able to "mean" the curse and was able to enjoy it in the sense that he wanted Amycus to feel what he had caused others to feel. Sadistic? No, I don't think so. Revenge, most definitely. I think he used his righteous anger to get him to the point where he could mean the curse.




From bruce_alan_wilson at verizon.net  Fri May 15 02:56:25 2009
From: bruce_alan_wilson at verizon.net (Bruce Alan Wilson)
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 22:56:25 -0400
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
Message-ID: <78C824EAE75941DBB4A9017E83E546E6@d600xpp>

No: HPFGUIDX 186594

Carol:

"He may actually have thought that, DE or not, the man who put his name in the Goblet of Fire and turned the TWT cup into a portkey to send him to Voldemort and killed his own father and Imperio'd Krum to make him Crucio Cedric really was a good teacher."

Did Crouch, Jr./FakeMoody's students learn the material or not?  

If they did, then he was a good teacher.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

BAW



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Fri May 15 03:56:12 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 03:56:12 -0000
Subject: DH  reread CH 15-17
Message-ID: <guip4s+ofj8@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186595

Nothing really jumped at me, especially nothing new with Sword stuff lol. I mean I did want to shake Ron in chapter 15 all over again and I am still not sure how Hermione knows that Horcrux influences him that much. Not disputing it one way or another, just wondering how does she know, since to me it is definitely not much information.

Now, chapter 16 to me feels even more Christian than before, but I do wonder how does Hermione know what "The last enemy that shall be destroyed in death" means?

I mean, I know I know I know she is Hermione, she knows everything, but come on now, she is now Bible scholar as well?

I almost cried when I read this:

"He let them fall, his lips pressed hard together, looking down at the thick snow hiding from his eyes the place where the last of Lily and James lay, bones now, surely or dust, not knowing or caring that their living son stood so near, his heart still beating, alive because of their sacrifice and close to wishing, at this moment, that he was sleeping under the snow with them" - p.269


Batilda Snakey was sick in a cool way if you ask me, but how thick Harry can be sometimes, huh? I mean, Harry you are in a company of the woman who does not *talk* (and nobody previously mentioned that Batilda has this particular disability) and you go with her?

THEN you feel Horcrux, you freaking HEAR "hold him" and you just standing here? Okay then.

I don't know, I know we debated the Potters' murder scene and whether the fact that James died without a wand makes him less heroic, but I don't know, his death hit me HARD all over again, because I found this description to be more poignant than probably scene of any fight James would have had, but that's JMO:

"They had not drawn the curtains, he saw them quite clearly in their little sitting room, the tall black-haired man in his glasses, making puffs of coloured smoke crupt from his wand for the amusement of the small black-haired boy in his blue pyjamas. The child was laughing and trying to catch the smoke, to grab it in its small fist..." - p.280



I have to say though that even though lot of us figured out that Harry will have to visit Godric Hollow, I imagined this visit completely differently before DH came out.

How about you guys?

Alla




From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Fri May 15 04:22:15 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 04:22:15 -0000
Subject: Nature of Sadistic Behavior: was:Re: Lack of re-examination
In-Reply-To: <gui0sh+o4bh@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guiqln+3lpj@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186596


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "a_svirn" <a_svirn at ...> wrote:
>
> > Steve wrote:
> > > >
> > > Harry cast the spell to punish Amicus for what Amicus was doing to Minerva.  Where in canon does it say Harry cast the spell as sadistic torture or that he enjoyed casting the spell in a manner that would indicate he was a sadistic person?  I don't see Harry Potter as sadistic.  
> > 
> > Carol responds:
> > I don't think that anyone is arguing that Harry is a sadistic person, only that he had a sadistic moment that we don't see him regret.
> 
> <snip> 
> > Again, I'm not saying that Harry is a sadist. I'm saying that, under the extreme pressure of Voldemort's impending arrival, he had a sadistic moment. It would be absurd to compare him with Umbridge or Barty Crouch, much less Bellatrix or Voldemort, and say that he's as much of a sadist as they are. <snip>
> 
> a_svirn:
> Which is precisely why no one agues it. I agree with pretty much everything you've said, and I only picked on Pippin's thought that a sadistic person punishes sadistically because it leads to further questions, i.e. does a non-sadistic person punishes non-sadistically? Simply by virtue of him or her being non-sadistic? And if a non-sadistic person does on occasion punish sadistically, where does it leave us? 
> 
> I feel uncomfortable with this sort of divorcing a person's actions from his or her, well, nature, I guess. That's exactly why I, for example, cannot buy Dumbledore's asserting that Draco's not only "not a killer at heart", but even somehow `innocent' even though he demonstrably is not innocent. He's innocent; we are invited to believe, because of his inner qualities. It doesn't matter what he does ? at heart he's "not a killer". Of course it's true only to a point ? if he kills by his own hand his inner qualities would change. From which fate he is saved by Snape whose soul Dumbledore is willing to risk for whatever reason.  
> 
> Honestly I'd take a murderer at heart who abides the law in practice over an innocent at heart who's running all over the place plotting and executing murders with various degrees of success any day. I also think that when a non-sadistic person like Harry indulges in sadism --it's just plain wrong. It feels even worse somehow than when a sadistic person does it. Precisely because Harry can restrain himself, but chooses not to. And because it rather blurs the line between those two types of persons, if only momentarily. What baffles me is that no one in the series apparently thinks so. 
> 
> 
> > Carol, hoping that Harry will not look back with pride on that moment
> 
> a_svirn, rather doubting that Harry will spare it a thought.

Steve again:

I'm going to take off my HP fan hat and put on my Counselor hat for this one. (Or at least try to). A sadist acts sadistically most of the time and has a pattern of sadistic behavior. Sadists are at times, however, capable of acts that at least pass for acts of kindness and consideration for others. Their motivations for doing these acts are usually different than the motivations of kind and decent or non sadistic types of people. Sadists sometimes are kind to others to attone for previous acts of violence or harm. Sometimes there are certain types of people for which sadists are simply compelled to do acts of kindness towards. But, in general, sadists are very dysfunctional and often psychotic individuals. 

Good and decent normal people have a conscience, yet are at times capable of harming others or in doing acts of violence. This is rare however, and happens usually under extreme stress and because of some kind of provocation. It's reactionary and usually brief, and rarely is serious to the extent of murder or extreme violence. (When murder or extreme violence does occur with someone who isn't normally sadistic or violent, it's a case essentially of "temporary insanity" or a brief break from sane and normal behavior into insane and abnormal behavior. Unfortunately, the results are the same for the victom). People who aren't sadists are able to draw the line and stop themselves before really severe acts of violence occur.  Sadists don't have that degree of self control.  Sadists don't have as active a conscience as non sadists do.

Harry isn't sadistic by nature, but did in anger do a violent act towards another person and did to some degree enjoy, or at least intend on doing so. Normal people do that kind of thing at times.  It doesn't make them a sadist or a dysfunctional person. But Harry isn't normal.  He's a wizard during a wizard war and his act was done under extreme stress to a person he had reason to hate for denegrating a person he cared about and revered. It was a random act that was the exception to the rule of his usually kind behavior rather than another sadistic example of a pattern of sadistic behavior.

Truly sadistic people will not be able to refrain from acting sadistically very long. It's an addiction and has to have an outlet.  Truly good, decent and normally kind people will feel guilty for any act of violence as well.  They will think about it, will hopefully talk about it and achieve closure and forgive themselves and move on. I don't know if Harry did or didn't do this, but after reading hundreds of thousands of words about him, I feel he is the kind of person who would in some way feel remorse for any act of unkindness.  Afterall, remorse is a concept he was most familiar with.

I hope what I wrote didn't confuse you more...lol.  You did ask very poignant and perceptive questions. Too bad we couldn't ask JKR them and see what her responses were.

Steve, who believes that Harry won't do another crucio curse again.




From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Fri May 15 05:15:32 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 05:15:32 -0000
Subject: DH  reread CH 15-17
In-Reply-To: <guip4s+ofj8@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guitpk+oiom@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186597

Alla wrote:
> I have to say though that even though lot of us figured out that Harry will have to visit Godric Hollow, I imagined this visit completely differently before DH came out.
> 
> How about you guys?
> 

Montavilla47:

I wasn't expecting anything in particular from the visit to Godric's
Hallow.  I suppose that I thought Harry would visit his parents' 
graves and that would be sad.

I was also expecting that Harry *would* discover an important
clue, most likely inside the cottage, since it was the scene of 
a crime.

I definitely was not expecting a honkin' big snake to come out
an old lady's body!







From foxmoth at qnet.com  Fri May 15 14:18:04 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 14:18:04 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <gui0sh+o4bh@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gujtis+4glo@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186598

 
A_svirn
> Honestly I'd take a murderer at heart who abides the law in practice over an innocent at heart who's running all over the place plotting and executing murders with various degrees of success any day.

Pippin:

It would take courage to put your trust in Draco's nascent and wavering sense of human dignity rather than in The Establishment. But laws seldom protect everyone equally even when they are supposed to, and they would have to be draconian laws indeed for your murderer to fear them more than he fears  Lord Voldemort. Nor will laws to protect human life endure  if people cease to believe that life is worth protecting.

Snape is a sadist with a lot of self-control, Harry is a non-sadist with much less -- whom do you trust more?


A_svirn:
 I also think that when a non-sadistic person like Harry indulges in sadism --it's just plain wrong. It feels even worse somehow than when a sadistic person does it. Precisely because Harry can restrain himself, but chooses not to. And because it rather blurs the line between those two types of persons, if only momentarily. What baffles me is that no one in the series apparently thinks so. 
>

Pippin:


I didn't get the impression from canon that Harry could restrain himself but was choosing not to. The blood was "thundering through his brain." It was "pounding in his veins" when he was considering transfiguring Dudley. And I get a sense that this is what Snape feels much of the time when he is confronting Harry. How many times have we been told that Snape's temple is throbbing or that he is turning dark red?

But despite this Snape does not ever use the cruciatus curse, or ever punish anyone in any way that is forbidden by law or Hogwarts rules. So he may be a sadist at heart, in the sense that his cruelty has become habitual,  but he has more self-control than Harry,  who is not habitually cruel but is capable of extreme behavior when provoked and was not able to keep himself from  using a curse that he ordinarily considers abhorrent. He wanted to use it *because* it was abhorrent, the worst thing he could think of, much like Snape calling Lily "the unforgivable word."

But I think what Harry understands from The Prince's Tale is that Snape's habits of cruelty were formed in childhood, before he had any control over them, forged out of the same kind of trauma that  provoked Harry to be cruel, ie, seeing someone he loved being abused, and feeling powerless to do anything about it. 

Does that make sense?

Pippin






From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Fri May 15 15:21:37 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 15:21:37 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <gujtis+4glo@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guk1a1+2ois@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186599

"pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
>
>  
> A_svirn
> > Honestly I'd take a murderer at heart who abides the law in practice over an innocent at heart who's running all over the place plotting and executing murders with various degrees of success any day.
> 
> Pippin:
> 
> It would take courage to put your trust in Draco's nascent and wavering sense of human dignity rather than in The Establishment. But laws seldom protect everyone equally even when they are supposed to, and they would have to be draconian laws indeed for your murderer to fear them more than he fears  Lord Voldemort. Nor will laws to protect human life endure  if people cease to believe that life is worth protecting.
> 
> Snape is a sadist with a lot of self-control, Harry is a non-sadist with much less -- whom do you trust more?
> 
> 
> A_svirn:
>  I also think that when a non-sadistic person like Harry indulges in sadism --it's just plain wrong. It feels even worse somehow than when a sadistic person does it. Precisely because Harry can restrain himself, but chooses not to. And because it rather blurs the line between those two types of persons, if only momentarily. What baffles me is that no one in the series apparently thinks so. 
> >
> 
> Pippin:
> 
> 
> I didn't get the impression from canon that Harry could restrain himself but was choosing not to. The blood was "thundering through his brain." It was "pounding in his veins" when he was considering transfiguring Dudley. And I get a sense that this is what Snape feels much of the time when he is confronting Harry. How many times have we been told that Snape's temple is throbbing or that he is turning dark red?
> 
> But despite this Snape does not ever use the cruciatus curse, or ever punish anyone in any way that is forbidden by law or Hogwarts rules. So he may be a sadist at heart, in the sense that his cruelty has become habitual,  but he has more self-control than Harry,  who is not habitually cruel but is capable of extreme behavior when provoked and was not able to keep himself from  using a curse that he ordinarily considers abhorrent. He wanted to use it *because* it was abhorrent, the worst thing he could think of, much like Snape calling Lily "the unforgivable word."
> 
> But I think what Harry understands from The Prince's Tale is that Snape's habits of cruelty were formed in childhood, before he had any control over them, forged out of the same kind of trauma that  provoked Harry to be cruel, ie, seeing someone he loved being abused, and feeling powerless to do anything about it. 
> 
> Does that make sense?
> 
> Pippin
>
Steve replies:

It does make sense.  I don't agree that Harry was provoked to "be" cruel as much as he was provoked to do an act of cruelness, but that's nitpicking, so I'm just briefly mentioning it.  I would like to say though that Harry also has had a childhood full of abuse by the Dursleys and yet most of his behavior is not sadistic or cruel, but rather gentle and brave and even noble at times.  True he has a hard time controlling his emotions at times, but he does usually control them all the same.  I am just saying that when you consider he was raised by the Dursleys, had his parents murdered by an evil wizard and his Godfather murdered by a follower of that evil wizard, he's had a lot of trauma in his life that would have resulted in a lot of children becoming very sadistic bullies or worse. Childhood trauma and abuse is not in and of itself a valid excuse for being cruel or sadistic, but it has nonetheless been a contributing environmental factor unfortunately in many cases.  Harry's ability to love in spite of all that happened to him IMO prevented him from going in that dark direction. Harry's personality was such that he did give in to his anger in times of stress and provocation, but did this rarely and even then didn't like in Star Wars go over completely to the Dark Side. He still made choices of sacrifice to protect those he loved and still gave LV a chance for remorse even at the very end.

Steve, who thinks considering his childhood, that Harry turned out pretty well.




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Fri May 15 16:27:04 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 16:27:04 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <gujtis+4glo@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guk54o+qm74@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186600

> A_svirn
> > Honestly I'd take a murderer at heart who abides the law in practice over an innocent at heart who's running all over the place plotting and executing murders with various degrees of success any day.
> 
> Pippin:
> 
> It would take courage to put your trust in Draco's nascent and wavering sense of human dignity rather than in The Establishment.

a_svirn:
It would. And even greater self-confidence and belief in self- infallibility. But I don't understand what you are saying about the Establishment. Dumbledore was *the* Establishment ? at least within the Castle's walls ? and you know what? He had an uncommon degree of trust in his own abilities. 

> Pippin:
 But laws seldom protect everyone equally even when they are supposed to, and they would have to be draconian laws indeed for your murderer to fear them more than he fears  Lord Voldemort. 

a_svirn:
I don't know what they are supposed to be. I think "murderer at heart" is an absurd construct. Just as absurd as "not a killer at heart" is. If you murder then you are a murderer. If you attempt a murder you are a would-be murderer. Your inner qualities cannot be defined by a totally occasional circumstance of your victims being saved by someone else. 

> Pippin:
Nor will laws to protect human life endure  if people cease to believe that life is worth protecting.

a_svirn:
Amen to that. Where it applies to the matter at hand though? Dumbledore might have believed in protecting human life, but Draco? Not so much. And still he wasn't "a killer at heart". 

> Pippin:
> Snape is a sadist with a lot of self-control, Harry is a non-sadist with much less -- whom do you trust more?

a_svirn:
Erm. How do you diagnose Snape's sadism? He hasn't tortured anyone that we know of, has he? How do you identify a sadist-at-heart? But, yes, I appreciate his restraint. And he seemed to have proven himself as being trustworthy. Of course not as far as Voldemort was concerned.

> 
> A_svirn:
>  I also think that when a non-sadistic person like Harry indulges in sadism --it's just plain wrong. It feels even worse somehow than when a sadistic person does it. Precisely because Harry can restrain himself, but chooses not to. And because it rather blurs the line between those two types of persons, if only momentarily. What baffles me is that no one in the series apparently thinks so. 
> >
> 
> Pippin:
> 
> 
> I didn't get the impression from canon that Harry could restrain himself but was choosing not to. The blood was "thundering through his brain." It was "pounding in his veins" when he was considering transfiguring Dudley. 

a_svirn:
I was only going by your words that a sadistic person doesn't have a choice about liking inflicting pain. If we agree, as I believe everybody on this list does, that Harry is not a sadist, then he had a choice. Didn't he? 

> Pippin:
And I get a sense that this is what Snape feels much of the time when he is confronting Harry. How many times have we been told that Snape's temple is throbbing or that he is turning dark red?

a_svirn:
And how many times did Snape's restraint crack? Once, when they duelled in the end of HBP and when he'd just damned his own soul anyway. Pretty impressive for someone you call a sadist. 

> Pippin: 
> But despite this Snape does not ever use the cruciatus curse, or ever punish anyone in any way that is forbidden by law or Hogwarts rules. So he may be a sadist at heart, in the sense that his cruelty has become habitual,  <snip>

a_svirn:
Right. But should we use the word in this sense? When you stretch words' meanings like this they may eventually cease to mean anything at all. 

> Pippin:
> But I think what Harry understands from The Prince's Tale is that Snape's habits of cruelty were formed in childhood, before he had any control over them, forged out of the same kind of trauma that  provoked Harry to be cruel, ie, seeing someone he loved being abused, and feeling powerless to do anything about it. 
> 
> Does that make sense?
> 

a_svirn:
Yes, definitely. But I still think it's wrong to divorce peoples' inner nature, so to speak,  from their actual behaviour. At best it's confusing, quite often it's just a way to avoid accountability. 




From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Fri May 15 17:47:02 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 17:47:02 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guk54o+qm74@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guk9qm+5lu7@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186601

> a_svirn:
> Yes, definitely. But I still think it's wrong to divorce peoples' inner nature, so to speak,  from their actual behaviour. At best it's confusing, quite often it's just a way to avoid accountability.

Magpie:
I feel like that's a definite issue throughout the books or amongst readers. Because to use Draco as an example--and I think he's one of the best examples--as you say, he's taken steps to murder someone and people got hurt. But what does Dumbledore mean when he says he's not a killer? Because he got lucky/unlucky?

I get what he means in context--Draco doesn't really want to murder somebody. That's true. And I understand why Dumbledore's saying that--he's basically telling him to go with that impulse because it'll make him happier (and people will not be killed if he doesn't do anything to kill them). After the scene on the Tower Draco is, imo, genuinely not a killer because he is a person consciously does not to kill. 

But before then, what Draco really wants to do doesn't make the poison or the necklace less deadly. He's not a killer in the scene with Dumbledore because he doesn't throw a killing curse, not because his soul is innocent or he's good at heart. And that's the kind of grey area that gets weird, imo. Because I do get the feeling that there's some quality that characterize some characters and not others and that this quality changes their actions in some way. Snape's a sadist while Harry is not, despite Snape stopping Crucios that Harry throws. James' bullying does seem put across as fundamentally different than, say, Draco's, even when the text draws clear parallels with their language. (The twins, too.) Sorting of all types really does seem to be accurate within the series. Even if I'm not always sure what it means. That's why I do think there's a recognizable way of reading the text that seems like reading against it--and I know I'm not the only person who focuses on this pattern--where you expect peoples' actions to have a different weight than they do. 

-m




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Fri May 15 18:14:11 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 18:14:11 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guk54o+qm74@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gukbdj+d71s@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186602

> > Pippin:
> <snip> And I get a sense that this is what Snape feels much of the time when he is confronting Harry. How many times have we been told that Snape's temple is throbbing or that he is turning dark red?

Carol responds:
Not all that often that I can think of. Only under strong provocation. The description fits Uncle Vernon better. No, I don't want to argue whether Uncle Vernon is a sadist. But I don't see any evidence that Snape is. Umbridge, Barty Jr., Bellatrix, Voldemort, yes. Snape, no. I think that his biting sarcasm is a habit developed as a defense mechanism. As for the detentions, they're generally well-deserved--and annoying but not painful. They're considerably less dangerous than sending eleven-year-olds out to help Hagrid find the monster that's sucking unicorn blood, and nothing at all compared with Umbridge's quill. Now Filch, who wants to restore the old methods--chaining kids to the wall, whipping, etc.--there's a sadist for you, if a rather pathetic one.)
> 
> a_svirn:
> And how many times did Snape's restraint crack? Once, when they duelled in the end of HBP and when he'd just damned his own soul anyway. Pretty impressive for someone you call a sadist. 

Carol responds:
I agree in general, but I don't think that Snape has just damned his soul. Dumbledore has presented the action to him as not only necessary to save Draco's soul but as a humanitarian means of saving a dying old man from other DEs who might Crucio him and from the teeth of Fenrir Greyback. And, although we don't hear those arguments in the Prince's Tale, we know that Snape knows that DD is counting on him to, among other things, take over as headmaster to protect the students of Hogwarts and somehow send a crucial message to Harry. DD asks him specifically if he thinks that killing him to save him from torture and humiliation will damage his soul and Snape, after thinking about it, agrees to do what DD wants. IOW, he has concluded that his action is not murder and won't tear his soul. (The word "damn" is not used; the only soul that we see condemned to eternal punishment is Voldemort's, and he has mutilated it himself.)

Still, I agree with you that Snape's restraint at the end of HBP is remarkable as he confronts Harry's charges of cowardice after he's just performed the bravest action of his life against his own wishes and just saved Harry from a Crucio. No wonder his restraint breaks at the end and he yields to the temptation to hit Harry with what appears to be a Stinging Hex. He must have thought that Harry deserved to be punished, just as Harry thought that Amycus deserved to be punished. And yet, Snape, unlike Harry, doesn't use the Cruciatus Curse.

If he were a sadist, he would not have stopped the DE's Crucio and would have used one himself. (Just to be clear, I agree with a-svirn on this point. I just don't think that Snape damned his soul. But that he's in a self-created hell of remorse is clear from his expression. Even Harry understands that he's in as much pain as Fang in the burning hut.)
> 
> > Pippin: 
> > But despite this Snape does not ever use the cruciatus curse, or ever punish anyone in any way that is forbidden by law or Hogwarts rules. So he may be a sadist at heart, in the sense that his cruelty has become habitual,  <snip>
>
Carol:
He doesn't use the Cruciatus Curse or any other form of painful detention, but his cruelty has become habitual? I don't follow your logic. What has become habitual, IMO, is the facade of cold sarcasm, which he uses with Bellatrix as well as with Harry. The facade drops only when he's with Dumbledore or when he's being courteous to Narcissa or when he's trying to help Draco. I don't doubt that he gets some degree of vindictive pleasure out stinging certain people with his words, but, like Harry and his attempted Crucios, he usually thinks that they deserve it. (As for Neville, he's just annoyed and frustrated with the kid's dangerous ineptitude.) 

At any rate, I disagree that he's a "sadist at heart." If he were, he'd be like Barty Jr., finding excuses to use Transfiguration or other forms of magic on students. We don't see his DADA lessons, but I doubt that he used the Imperius Curse on the students or tortured and killed spiders before their eyes. Instead, he uses posters to illustrate the effects of the curses, discusses them in class, gives them reading assignments, and assigns difficult essays. (The students may consider the essays to be cruel and horrible instruments of torture, but they're a standard teaching method which, probably, enabled Harry and even Ron to get an E in Potions. They learned in spite of themselves through his "cruel" assignments.) 

a_svirn:
<snip>  I still think it's wrong to divorce peoples' inner nature, so to speak,  from their actual behaviour. At best it's confusing, quite often it's just a way to avoid accountability.

Carol responds:
I agree. Severus apparently saw his mother being abused in his childhood and learned to hate Muggles, and possibly he picked up the habit of sarcasm from his father, but he was also apparently abused himself (certainly neglected and bullied by MWPP), so I still think that the sarcasm is a defense mechanism rather than innate cruelty. (His capacity to love and to admire the virtues he sees in Lily as reflected in his Patronus and his instinct to teach Lily when they're both children show that he's not innately cruel. And what "cruelty" he shows as an adult is demonstrated only through verbal abuse, never through physical abuse, despite his adult size, his authority, and his impressive magical abilities. Sure, he sometimes takes advantage of his position to insult a student or dock points unfairly, but I wouldn't call that sadism. We need only compare him with Umbridge or Barty Jr. to see how a real sadist would operate within the confines of Hogwarts under cover of the rules and/or the authority of the Ministry. (I'm not bringing in the Carrows, who showed no restraint at all, because they wouldn't have been hired in the first place had Voldemort not taken over the Ministry.)

Carol, who agrees with Pippin that "The Prince's Tale" enables Harry to understand and forgive Snape by revealing how much they have in common but would not label either of them as a sadist

P.S. List Elves: Please don't count this message as two posts if it posts twice. I'll delete one of them.




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Fri May 15 19:11:40 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 19:11:40 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guk9qm+5lu7@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gukepc+6362@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186603

a_svirn:
> > ,snip> But I still think it's wrong to divorce peoples' inner nature, so to speak,  from their actual behaviour. At best it's confusing, quite often it's just a way to avoid accountability.
> 
> Magpie:
> I feel like that's a definite issue throughout the books or amongst readers. Because to use Draco as an example--and I think he's one of the best examples--as you say, he's taken steps to murder someone and people got hurt. But what does Dumbledore mean when he says he's not a killer? Because he got lucky/unlucky?
> 
> I get what he means in context--Draco doesn't really want to murder somebody. That's true. And I understand why Dumbledore's saying that--he's basically telling him to go with that impulse because it'll make him happier (and people will not be killed if he doesn't do anything to kill them). After the scene on the Tower Draco is, imo, genuinely not a killer because he is a person consciously does not to kill. 
> 
> But before then, what Draco really wants to do doesn't make the poison or the necklace less deadly. He's not a killer in the scene with Dumbledore because he doesn't throw a killing curse, not because his soul is innocent or he's good at heart. And that's the kind of grey area that gets weird, imo. <snip>

Carol responds:

I snipped the last part of your post because I think I understand what you're saying but it's so different from my own view that I'm just going to hoist the agree-to-disagree flag rather than attempting to discuss it. 

But with regard to Draco, I agree with you. As Hermione says, the person who poisoned the mead (or arranged to have it poisoned) and tried to bring the cursed necklace into the school is actually more dangerous than a determined killer focusing on a single target because he nearly kills innocent people in his carelessness and desperation. So even though Draco finds himself unable to kill Dumbledore when they're face to face and lowers his wand slightly, we can't regard him as innocent. He's been trying, however ineptly, to kill Dumbledore all year; he has endangered his classmates; and he has brought Death Eaters into Hogwarts. (That he didn't want the horrible Fenrir Greyback to be included humanizes him slightly but does not make his action any more innocent.) He is unqestionably an accessory before the fact in Dumbledore's death, which in his own view as in Harry's is a murder since he thinks that Snape is a loyal Death Eater and has no idea of the arrangements between him and Dumbledore. And, had any of the other DEs killed DD, it *would* have been murder. (He has also Imperio'd Madam Rosmerta, using an Unforgiveable Curse to make *her* an accomplice to intended murder.)

Then what does Dumbledore mean by suggesting that Draco is an innocent? Or is he referring to Draco at all when he says that killing is not as easy as the innocent believe? Possibly, he means that Draco is "innocent" in that he has not killed. Or maybe he means that Draco has lost his innocence and learned through experience that killing isn't as easy as those who are truly innocent believe. Certainly, he doesn't believe that Draco's soul is as "pure" as Harry's (setting aside the question of whether Harry's is really pure, which I don't want to get into here). DD tells Snape that Draco's soul is "not yet so damaged" that he would want it to be "ripped apart on his account" (DH Am. ed. 685). The implication is that Draco's soul is spotted and impure but whole and DD wants it to stay that way. (Draco's soul would be torn because his killing of DD, however reluctantly, would be murder; Snape's killing of DD, in contrast, would be a humanitarian act to "help an old man avoid pain and humiliation" (and save Draco's soul in the process), not murder, so his soul--more damaged already than Draco's but still intact--is safe from further damage.)

To return to Draco. On the one hand, Dumbledore is psychologically manipulating him when he says that Draco is not a killer. But, on the other hand, he's clearly right. If Draco were the cold-blooded killer he imagines himself to be at the beginning of the year, bent on avenging his father and earning lasting "glory" as Voldemort's favorite Death Eater, he'd have found a way to kill Dumbledore more quickly and efficiently or at least repaired the Vanishing Cabinet more quickly to bring in DE back-up since even with an injured hand, the "stupid old man" was likely to be more than a match for a sixteen-year-old boy. 

Besides the lessons he learns about the real nature of Voldemort, Draco does learn that killing is difficult and that he, unlike Aunt Bellatrix, is not a killer. He may have had no difficulty with the Imperius Curse, but he later finds that he doesn't like Crucioing people, either. (How he manages to cast the spell without enjoying it, I don't know, but I'm ignoring JKR's inconsistencies here.) HBP teaches him that he doesn't have the makings of a Death Eater. He isn't his father (an interesting parallel with Harry that might be worth exploring at some point).

Draco is an interesting case of a character who starts out bad, an arrogant bully and a bigot who supports the Dark Lord and the weeding out of Muggle-borns and "blood traitors." (Harry's belief that Draco is enamored of Dark magic seems to have no basis in canon, but he has plenty of unpleasant characteristics and the potential to fall into evil without that particular trait.) The mission to kill Dumbledore (which turns out to be dangerous and difficult and not at all glorious) reshapes Draco's thinking. He does not become good, exactly. He can't recover his lost innocence (which, nasty as he was, he must have had before his parents indoctrinated him and he started wishing death on Muggle-borns). He can't undo attempted murder or his role as accessory in the death of Dumbledore. And he can't find the courage actually to stand up to Voldemort for fear of death and torture for himself and his family. But he does, at least, refuse to directly identify HRH to his still-loyal DE father and his sadistic Aunt Bellatrix. He at least wants to do the right thing as far as possible without being tortured or killed. He's not brave. He's not strong. But he's not evil. He's not a killer. And he's much more human, much more pitiable, than he was before HBP (IMO). He is effectively neutralized,  and, in the epilogue, grudgingly grateful to Harry. whether he becomes a productive citizen, we don't know, but he seems unlikely to fall into further evil even if another Dark Lord arises to take Voldemort's place.

Carol, who thinks that Draco's incomplete redemption is as much as we can expect from a character brought up in a family of Pure-Blood supremacists and Voldemort supporters




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Fri May 15 21:25:31 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 21:25:31 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <gukepc+6362@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gukmkb+cae7@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186604

> > Magpie:
> > I feel like that's a definite issue throughout the books or amongst readers. Because to use Draco as an example--and I think he's one of the best examples--as you say, he's taken steps to murder someone and people got hurt. But what does Dumbledore mean when he says he's not a killer? Because he got lucky/unlucky?
> > 
> > I get what he means in context--Draco doesn't really want to murder somebody. That's true. And I understand why Dumbledore's saying that--he's basically telling him to go with that impulse because it'll make him happier (and people will not be killed if he doesn't do anything to kill them). After the scene on the Tower Draco is, imo, genuinely not a killer because he is a person consciously does not to kill. 
> > 
> > But before then, what Draco really wants to do doesn't make the poison or the necklace less deadly. He's not a killer in the scene with Dumbledore because he doesn't throw a killing curse, not because his soul is innocent or he's good at heart. And that's the kind of grey area that gets weird, imo. <snip>
> 
> Carol responds:
> 
> I snipped the last part of your post because I think I understand what you're saying but it's so different from my own view that I'm just going to hoist the agree-to-disagree flag rather than attempting to discuss it. 
> 
> But with regard to Draco, I agree with you. As Hermione says, the person who poisoned the mead (or arranged to have it poisoned) and tried to bring the cursed necklace into the school is actually more dangerous than a determined killer focusing on a single target because he nearly kills innocent people in his carelessness and desperation. So even though Draco finds himself unable to kill Dumbledore when they're face to face and lowers his wand slightly, we can't regard him as innocent. He's been trying, however ineptly, to kill Dumbledore all year; he has endangered his classmates; and he has brought Death Eaters into Hogwarts. (That he didn't want the horrible Fenrir Greyback to be included humanizes him slightly but does not make his action any more innocent.) He is unqestionably an accessory before the fact in Dumbledore's death, which in his own view as in Harry's is a murder since he thinks that Snape is a loyal Death Eater and has no idea of the arrangements between him and Dumbledore. And, had any of the other DEs killed DD, it *would* have been murder. (He has also Imperio'd Madam Rosmerta, using an Unforgiveable Curse to make *her* an accomplice to intended murder.)
> 
> Then what does Dumbledore mean by suggesting that Draco is an innocent? Or is he referring to Draco at all when he says that killing is not as easy as the innocent believe? Possibly, he means that Draco is "innocent" in that he has not killed. 

a_svirn:
In other words, argues technicalities at wandpoint? Possibly. 

> Carol:
Or maybe he means that Draco has lost his innocence and learned through experience that killing isn't as easy as those who are truly innocent believe. 

a_svirn:
Learn through the experience of ... murdering or trying hard to murder someone? While still not being a "killer at heart"? 

> Carol:
Certainly, he doesn't believe that Draco's soul is as "pure" as Harry's (setting aside the question of whether Harry's is really pure, which I don't want to get into here). DD tells Snape that Draco's soul is "not yet so damaged" that he would want it to be "ripped apart on his account" (DH Am. ed. 685). The implication is that Draco's soul is spotted and impure but whole and DD wants it to stay that way. 

a_svirn:
Yes, he seems to have a rather disturbing habit of grading other peoples' souls. Certainly he is much more concerned with the state of Draco's soul, than that of Snape. 

> Carol:
(Draco's soul would be torn because his killing of DD, however reluctantly, would be murder; Snape's killing of DD, in contrast, would be a humanitarian act to "help an old man avoid pain and humiliation" (and save Draco's soul in the process), not murder, so his soul--more damaged already than Draco's but still intact--is safe from further damage.)

a_svirn:
I wonder why did Snape seem so devastated, very nearly deranged even, after committing this "humanitarian act" and saving Draco's soul in the process. Should he not have congratulated himself with the job well done instead? It looks like he wasn't on the same wave with Dumbledore on that one. 

> Carol:
> To return to Draco. On the one hand, Dumbledore is psychologically manipulating him when he says that Draco is not a killer. 

a_svirn:
Agreed. 

> Carol:
But, on the other hand, he's clearly right. If Draco were the cold-blooded killer he imagines himself to be at the beginning of the year, bent on avenging his father and earning lasting "glory" as Voldemort's favorite Death Eater, he'd have found a way to kill Dumbledore more quickly and efficiently or at least repaired the Vanishing Cabinet more quickly to bring in DE back-up since even with an injured hand, the "stupid old man" was likely to be more than a match for a sixteen-year-old boy. 

a_svirn:
If Dumbledore was easy to kill he wouldn't have lasted for so long. Moreover, everyone who was privy to the plan wouldn't have assumed that Draco was doomed to fail, and that it was actually Voldemort's way of punishing his father. And there is nothing in canon to suggest that Draco had been sabotaging his own work on cabinet. Quite the contrary: he was jubilant when he finally solved the problem. 

No, Draco is not a cold-blooded, bold avenger. He's instead queasy-stomached, panicky and inept. Moreover, I quite agree with magpie that in that scene at least he doesn't even want to kill. But it doesn't change the fact that he did try to kill several times, and that his victims survived not because of his inner qualities or Dumbledore's belief in his heart, but *despite* of all that. 

> Carol:
<snip>> 
> Draco is an interesting case of a character who starts out bad, an arrogant bully and a bigot who supports the Dark Lord and the weeding out of Muggle-borns and "blood traitors." (Harry's belief that Draco is enamored of Dark magic seems to have no basis in canon, but he has plenty of unpleasant characteristics and the potential to fall into evil without that particular trait.) The mission to kill Dumbledore (which turns out to be dangerous and difficult and not at all glorious) reshapes Draco's thinking. He does not become good, exactly. He can't recover his lost innocence (which, nasty as he was, he must have had before his parents indoctrinated him and he started wishing death on Muggle-borns). He can't undo attempted murder or his role as accessory in the death of Dumbledore. And he can't find the courage actually to stand up to Voldemort for fear of death and torture for himself and his family. But he does, at least, refuse to directly identify HRH to his still-loyal DE father and his sadistic Aunt Bellatrix. He at least wants to do the right thing as far as possible without being tortured or killed. 

a_svirn:
Does he though? Then what was he doing in the end of DH? Was he not trying to capture Harry and deliver him to his Lord and Master in order to regain his favour? Or, at the very least, sabotage whatever Harry was doing to prevail over Voldemort? 

> Carol:
He's not brave. He's not strong. But he's not evil. He's not a killer. 

a_svirn:
Not brave? Obviously. Not strong? Definitely. Not evil? No, probably, not. Not a killer? Well, he hasn't killed, certainly. But not for the lack of trying, so what does it tell of his heart? 


> Carol, who thinks that Draco's incomplete redemption is as much as we can expect from a character brought up in a family of Pure-Blood supremacists and Voldemort supporters

a_svirn:
Hm. I don't know. Sirius and Regulus's parents were Pureblood supremacists as well, yet they both ? each in their own fashion ? rejected their family values. 




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Fri May 15 23:51:14 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 23:51:14 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <guk9qm+5lu7@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gukv5i+nuu9@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186605

 
> Magpie:
> I feel like that's a definite issue throughout the books or amongst readers. Because to use Draco as an example--and I think he's one of the best examples--as you say, he's taken steps to murder someone and people got hurt. But what does Dumbledore mean when he says he's not a killer? Because he got lucky/unlucky?
> 
> I get what he means in context--Draco doesn't really want to murder somebody. That's true. And I understand why Dumbledore's saying that--he's basically telling him to go with that impulse because it'll make him happier (and people will not be killed if he doesn't do anything to kill them). After the scene on the Tower Draco is, imo, genuinely not a killer because he is a person consciously does not to kill. 

Pippin:
I think Dumbledore means something more than that. He says that the reason Draco failed so far is because they were such feeble attempts, so that he wonders, "whether your heart has been really in it." In other words, he thinks Draco unknowingly sabotaged himself. If Draco had whole-heartedly wished to kill, he would have brought to the task the same ingenuity and persistence that he gave to fixing the cabinet and communicating with Rosmerta. Instead he chose methods that were unlikely to reach Dumbledore and would probably be detected by such a powerful wizard if they did. 

Dumbledore could have turned Draco over to the Ministry and let them decide what should be done with him. But Dumbledore knew that regardless of what the Ministry decided, it wouldn't be able to stop Voldemort from killing Draco. Only he, Dumbledore, could do that and only if Draco remained at Hogwarts.  

That entailed some danger to the other students, but not necessarily more than if Draco had died at Voldemort's hands. Suppose Narcissa had had no reason to help Harry at the end? 

Magpie:
Because I do get the feeling that there's some quality that characterize some characters and not others and that this quality changes their actions in some way. Snape's a sadist while Harry is not, despite Snape stopping Crucios that Harry throws. James' bullying does seem put across as fundamentally different than, say, Draco's, even when the text draws clear parallels with their language. (The twins, too.) 

Pippin:
I think you're right. Some characters are habitually cruel, and some aren't. 

IMO, Harry  only occasionally tries to be cruel. Another poster described sadism as addiction, so perhaps we can draw an analogy with alcoholism. A non-alcoholic can get drunk and cause a fight or an accident. OTOH, an alcoholic may be able to avoid fighting or driving when he is drunk, but that doesn't mean he can control his drinking. 

So, a non-sadist can perform the cruciatus curse or attempt it occasionally, while a sadist may be able to choose not to use it. But he will have to find some outlet for his need to cause pain. And as an alcoholic may discover that he still needs to drink even if he hates himself for drinking, so a wizard addicted to causing pain may need to do that, even if he hates himself for it. And since Draco is good at occlumency, he may have the ability to shut down those thoughts and feelings that would inhibit him from performing the curse.

 I think Snape both likes and needs to cause pain, emotional if not physical, and it's become a habit. Harry has discovered the "like" for inflicting  pain but hasn't done it enough to make it a habitual need, IMO.  

IMO, James bullied to get attention, not because he liked or needed to see people suffer. A sadist would have been watching Snape grovel -- Snape never would have been able to go for his wand while James was distracted. The same is true of Fred and George -- sadists would never have stuffed Montague into a cabinet and made him disappear -- they'd have wanted to see what happened to him.

Pippin







From wildirishrose at fiber.net  Sat May 16 05:21:40 2009
From: wildirishrose at fiber.net (wildirishrose01us)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 05:21:40 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP
In-Reply-To: <gu6r7j+9a7v@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gulih4+j2co@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186606

> Steve replies:
> 
> I found a lot of things funny in the Harry Potter books. Ron and the twins for example are hilarious.  Some of what they said and did offended some, but not me, I loved it all. Luna was my absolute favorite, as was everyone's responses to what she would say and do.
> 
> And for me at least, certain characters were simply comical on their own merits, w/o saying anything funny.  Crabbe and Goyle crack me up just standing behind Malfoy like grouchy gargoyles waiting to pounce.  Hagrid trying to squeeze through the doorway at the Burrough. Umbridge being carried off by the centaurs. Students in the common room puking up stuff as part of the twins experiments next to other students studying as if nothing strange is happening next to them. Kreacher hitting Mundungus w/ a frying pan. Ginny's favorite spell being bat boogies.  Gnomes being thrown out of the garden.
> 
> There's a lot of tension at times in the novels. Humor is one of the best ways to alleviate tension and give the readers a chance to relax and move forward again. JKR created many characters that were real enough to be funny at times.  Those of us who appreciate that humor enjoy the books on a level others are unable or unwilling to
. 
> Steve, who loves British comedies, especially Monty Python, Red Dwarf and Faulty Towers, but wishes anyone good luck in finding it in Jane Austen.


Marianne:

I'm so glad to find somebody besides me and my son that appreciates Red Dwarf humor.  I also like Are You Being Served, Mr. Bean and Keeping Up Appearances.  And my all time favorite (after Red Dwarf) is Dr. Who.  The new ones.  Although I'm not sure it's about humor, but it can crack me up a times.  There are other British comedies I like, but I can't mention them all.

Anyway, back to humor in HP.  One part that made/makes me laugh is in the Goblet of Fire.  I read it twice, the part of the book, and then burst out laughing.  Obviously this is not canon.

They are at the Quidditch world cup. A ministry wizard is trying to get another wizard, who is wearing a ladies dressing gown, to put on a pair of pants.

 MMW: "Just put them on Archie,there's a good chap.  You can't walk around like that."

Archie: "I bought this in a muggle shop.  Muggles wear them."

MMW: "Muggle women wear them Archie, not the men" as he tries to give him the pants.

Archie:  "I'm not putting them on.  I like a healthy breeze around my privates, thanks."

Marianne







From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Sat May 16 14:40:01 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 14:40:01 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <gukv5i+nuu9@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gumj81+9g1j@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186607

> > Magpie:
> > I feel like that's a definite issue throughout the books or amongst readers. Because to use Draco as an example--and I think he's one of the best examples--as you say, he's taken steps to murder someone and people got hurt. But what does Dumbledore mean when he says he's not a killer? Because he got lucky/unlucky?
> > 
> > I get what he means in context--Draco doesn't really want to murder somebody. That's true. And I understand why Dumbledore's saying that--he's basically telling him to go with that impulse because it'll make him happier (and people will not be killed if he doesn't do anything to kill them). After the scene on the Tower Draco is, imo, genuinely not a killer because he is a person consciously does not to kill. 
> 
> Pippin:
> I think Dumbledore means something more than that. He says that the reason Draco failed so far is because they were such feeble attempts, so that he wonders, "whether your heart has been really in it." In other words, he thinks Draco unknowingly sabotaged himself. If Draco had whole-heartedly wished to kill, he would have brought to the task the same ingenuity and persistence that he gave to fixing the cabinet and communicating with Rosmerta. Instead he chose methods that were unlikely to reach Dumbledore and would probably be detected by such a powerful wizard if they did. 

a_svirn:
Yes, that's a fine example of Dumledore's peculiar logic. Draco's attempts had been "feeble" only as far as Dumbledore was concerned. They had, however, proved to be very nearly lethal for two people and could have easily brought about more deaths. So was Draco "not a killer" because he was unconsciously reluctant to murder Dumbledore specifically? Being at the same time unconsciously (and, presumably, consciously) fine with murdering innocent bystanders does not cause the loss of innocence? An interesting spin on this whole "not-a-killer-at-heart" spiel, but even this weird explanation does not stand the scrutiny. Because, you know, Draco did put a lot of ingenuity into repairing the cabinet. And his work on the cabinet ... yes, brought about Dumbledore's murder. So judging by Dumbledore's own standards Draco put a lot of ingenuity in the task of murdering him. All of which would seem to point out that he was in fact "a killer at heart" even if he didn't kill in practice. 


> Magpie:
> Because I do get the feeling that there's some quality that characterize some characters and not others and that this quality changes their actions in some way. Snape's a sadist while Harry is not, despite Snape stopping Crucios that Harry throws. James' bullying does seem put across as fundamentally different than, say, Draco's, even when the text draws clear parallels with their language. (The twins, too.) 
> 
> Pippin:
> I think you're right. Some characters are habitually cruel, and some aren't. 
> 
> IMO, Harry  only occasionally tries to be cruel. Another poster described sadism as addiction, so perhaps we can draw an analogy with alcoholism. A non-alcoholic can get drunk and cause a fight or an accident. OTOH, an alcoholic may be able to avoid fighting or driving when he is drunk, but that doesn't mean he can control his drinking. 

a_svirn:
I am not sure that sadism is an "addiction", actually. But even if we go by your analogy with alcoholism, do you think we should cut some more slack for a non-alcoholic who fought and killed someone while inebriated then to an alcoholic who did the same? I don't think so. And I'll bet most people don't think so. But that's exactly what we are invited to do in the books. Repeatedly. When a bad guy tortures it just demonstrates his or her inner badness. When a good guy tortures it's, well, just a minor quirk. An exception under the extreme provocation. Perhaps it's not even torture? After all, it's a good guy we are talking about. 

Not that I think alcoholism is a good analogy, because it's not a character trait, but a medical condition. You may be an alcoholic, but if you steer clear of the bottle, you are not a drunkard and that what matters. 

> Pippin:
> So, a non-sadist can perform the cruciatus curse or attempt it occasionally, while a sadist may be able to choose not to use it. 

a_svirn:
Aren't we told insistently that it is our choices that matter? If a sadist chooses not to practice sadism, then how come s/he's a sadist? Would it not mean that s/he is not a sadist, after all? What's the point of all those redemption talk if no matter what you are doing (or not doing as the case may be) you are still what you are in the darkness of your heart? 

> Pippin:
But he will have to find some outlet for his need to cause pain. And as an alcoholic may discover that he still needs to drink even if he hates himself for drinking, so a wizard addicted to causing pain may need to do that, even if he hates himself for it. And since Draco is good at occlumency, he may have the ability to shut down those thoughts and feelings that would inhibit him from performing the curse.

a_svirn:
Wait a minute. Is Draco a sadist at heart too? A sadist who hates his own sadism so much that when a much needed outlet is given to him on a silver platter he can only practice sadism with the help of Occlumency? It seems a bit too convoluted until you recall that using Occlumecy is a conscious act, which makes all this at heart/in practice dichotomy rather irrelevant. 

> Pippin:
>  I think Snape both likes and needs to cause pain, emotional if not physical, and it's become a habit.

a_svirn:
If it's become a habit, then he chooses to use it. You can't become accustomed to something you don't practice. 

> Pippin:
> IMO, James bullied to get attention, not because he liked or needed to see people suffer. 

a_svirn:
I guess the failure to appreciate the difference was just another sign of Snape's "habitual cruelty". He just judged James by his own standards, that was it. 

> Pippin:
A sadist would have been watching Snape grovel -- Snape never would have been able to go for his wand while James was distracted. 

a_svirn:
You mean sadists can't get distracted? Huh. Good for them.

> Pippin:
The same is true of Fred and George -- sadists would never have stuffed Montague into a cabinet and made him disappear -- they'd have wanted to see what happened to him.

a_svirn:
Can sadists be deterred from admiring their handiwork by other considerations? Like the desire to avoid being caught red-handed? I seem to remember Fred and George were very willing to see what had happened to Dudley. 






From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sat May 16 14:55:38 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 14:55:38 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not WAS: Re: Lack of re-examination
In-Reply-To: <gumj81+9g1j@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gumk5a+ce67@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186608

> > Pippin:
<SNIP>
> >  I think Snape both likes and needs to cause pain, emotional if not physical, and it's become a habit.
> 
> a_svirn:
> If it's become a habit, then he chooses to use it. You can't become accustomed to something you don't practice. 
<BIG SNIP>

Alla:

Are you saying that Snape does not **practice** inflicting emotional pain and that is why he cannot be called a sadist or are you saying something different? I of course cannot give many examples where he inflicts physical pain, but the ones where he inflicts emotional pain ( the ones that I intepret as such of course) I can give a plenty. How about I will leave the ones with Harry for later and bring the one where he assigned neville to cut horned toads (that was their name in Gof<yes?). Yeah, I know, he  may have needed them cut, no I would never ever believe that he could not find any other student to do that. I would never ever believe that he could not find another detention for Neville.

And that is of course after famous threat to poison Trevis. No, I do not care if he really meant to do it. To me what matters is that he said it out loud and to me he did it because he wanted to cause Neville emotional pain and to me he suceeded very well. 

JMO,

Alla




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Sat May 16 15:24:09 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 15:24:09 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not WAS: Re: Lack of re-examination
In-Reply-To: <gumk5a+ce67@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gumlqp+8svu@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186609

> > > Pippin:
> <SNIP>
> > >  I think Snape both likes and needs to cause pain, emotional if not physical, and it's become a habit.
> > 
> > a_svirn:
> > If it's become a habit, then he chooses to use it. You can't become accustomed to something you don't practice. 
> <BIG SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Are you saying that Snape does not **practice** inflicting emotional pain and that is why he cannot be called a sadist or are you saying something different? 

a_svirn:
I am saying that if someone, let say Snape, needs and finds an outlet for his inner needs, so much so that it's become a habit even, then the whole in heart/in practice thing is totally redundant and only obfuscates the matter at hand. If he's cruel that's because he chooses to *act* cruelly. Is heart as cruel as his actions? More cruel? Less cruel? Does it matter? Would it matter if he had a heart of gold if he still bullied Neville mercilessly?  




From eggplant107 at hotmail.com  Sat May 16 17:37:30 2009
From: eggplant107 at hotmail.com (eggplant107)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 17:37:30 -0000
Subject: Snape and Harrys Sadism  (was: Lack of re-examination)  
In-Reply-To: <gukbdj+d71s@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gumtkq+d3h9@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186610


Carol Wrote:

> I don't want to argue whether Uncle
> Vernon is a sadist. But I don't see
> any evidence that Snape is.

In 1999 JKR said "Snape is a very sadistic teacher"
but that far from settles the matter; she has her
opinion on the matter and we are free to have our own.

Rather than continue the debate over the morality
of Harry torturing people and enjoying it I want
to ask a very different question: Do you think
it was artistically wise of JKR to have Harry do
that, did she have to in a sense force Harry to
do it or did it come naturally? I think it was
very wise indeed. True it's not what a supernaturally
moral epic hero would do, but it is what a real flesh
and blood person would do if they'd have gone
through as much as Harry had. If in 7 books Harry
had never once shown a bit of joy in the pain on
one of his enemy's faces it just wouldn't ring
true to me because it's in the nature of war.

 Eggplant





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sat May 16 18:09:52 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 18:09:52 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not WAS: Re: Lack of re-examination
In-Reply-To: <gumlqp+8svu@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gumvhg+mou4@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186611

> > Alla:
> > 
> > Are you saying that Snape does not **practice** inflicting emotional pain and that is why he cannot be called a sadist or are you saying something different? 
> 
> a_svirn:
> I am saying that if someone, let say Snape, needs and finds an outlet for his inner needs, so much so that it's become a habit even, then the whole in heart/in practice thing is totally redundant and only obfuscates the matter at hand. If he's cruel that's because he chooses to *act* cruelly. Is heart as cruel as his actions? More cruel? Less cruel? Does it matter? Would it matter if he had a heart of gold if he still bullied Neville mercilessly?
>


Alla:

Ah, ok, sorry I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying that Snape is not a sadist because he does not practice it.  And while I acknowledge that to make a case for Snape as sadist enjoying physical pain is hard, I think that to make a case for him as sadist enjoying emotional pain is a piece of cake, for me of course.

I am following the thread, but do not know if I want to get involved into a whole "murderer at heart" thing. Partly because yes I think it does matter when the person slips and does something bad say once under stress, I would still think that person who is not predisposed to do something has less chance to slip up next time if any.

However, sure if person does bad things repeatedly, I do think that in heart/in practice thing becomes redundant.




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Sat May 16 18:46:00 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 18:46:00 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not WAS: Re: Lack of re-examination
In-Reply-To: <gumvhg+mou4@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gun1l8+a8td@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186612

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
>
> > > Alla:
> > > 
> > > Are you saying that Snape does not **practice** inflicting emotional pain and that is why he cannot be called a sadist or are you saying something different? 
> > 
> > a_svirn:
> > I am saying that if someone, let say Snape, needs and finds an outlet for his inner needs, so much so that it's become a habit even, then the whole in heart/in practice thing is totally redundant and only obfuscates the matter at hand. If he's cruel that's because he chooses to *act* cruelly. Is heart as cruel as his actions? More cruel? Less cruel? Does it matter? Would it matter if he had a heart of gold if he still bullied Neville mercilessly?
> >
> 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Ah, ok, sorry I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying that Snape is not a sadist because he does not practice it.  And while I acknowledge that to make a case for Snape as sadist enjoying physical pain is hard, I think that to make a case for him as sadist enjoying emotional pain is a piece of cake, for me of course.
> 
> I am following the thread, but do not know if I want to get involved into a whole "murderer at heart" thing. Partly because yes I think it does matter when the person slips and does something bad say once under stress, I would still think that person who is not predisposed to do something has less chance to slip up next time if any.

a_svirn:
Which is exactly why I find this "murderer at heart thing", as you say, so disturbing. I believe saying that bullying Neville and making him suffer emotionally constitutes sadism does rather stretch a conventional definition of the term. What bothers me though is that McGonagall who delights in bullying Neville and making him suffer emotionally every bit as much as Snape does somehow escapes the same "sadism" charge. Why? Is it because we are told that she is really a "big softie" very deep down? This is a nice circular argument we have there: because she is not "predisposed" to sadism she is not a sadist and therefore what she does is not sadism by definition. 




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sat May 16 18:58:23 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 18:58:23 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not WAS: Re: Lack of re-examination
In-Reply-To: <gun1l8+a8td@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gun2cf+6dai@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186613

> a_svirn:
> Which is exactly why I find this "murderer at heart thing", as you say, so disturbing. I believe saying that bullying Neville and making him suffer emotionally constitutes sadism does rather stretch a conventional definition of the term.

a_svirn:
What bothers me though is that McGonagall who delights in bullying Neville and making him suffer emotionally every bit as much as Snape does somehow escapes the same "sadism" charge. Why? Is it because we are told that she is really a "big softie" very deep down? This is a nice circular argument we have there: because she is not "predisposed" to sadism she is not a sadist and therefore what she does is not sadism by definition.

Alla:

And that is precisely why I do not want to get involved in the "murderer at heart" thing. I absolutely believe that there are character traits people are predisposed to and born with. I observe it on my niece and nephew. My niece was screaming if stranger as much as smiled at her when she was three or four months old and she is incredibly shy. My nephew is one year old today and He is **completely different** in that regard. He is smiling at everybody, he is not shy at all. And he was showing it just as my niece was when he was couple months old.

But of course whole nature/nurture debate is significantly more complicated then that. All that I am saying that I do not find the **idea** of person being predisposed to some things and not to others to be disturbing, that's all.

But to go back to Potterland, um, where are you getting that Mcgonagall escapes charge of sadism (from me at least) for the reason you described?

I agreed in the past that what Mcgonagall does to Neville here is completely horrible and yes, I think borders on abuse.

But I believe in my mind that what Snape does is worse and I think it is a bona fide reason regardless of how I feel about characters.

McGonagall does **NOT** single out Neville when she is asking "which incredibly foolish person", doesn't she? I believe that **anybody**, anybody who would have confessed would have gotten exactly same treatment from her.

So, while I do not like the treatment that she gives Neville, I totally think that she does not give a swat whom she disposes punishment to. While I think Snape very much does. I mean, cutting horned toads? Threatening to poison Trevor? Snape would have no chance to give anybody same punishment for the very simple reason that nobody else HAS a toad, no?

So, yes, I just think what Mcgonagall does here simply cannot be described as sadism and thus not very relevant just as you seem to believe that what Snape does is not sadism.

JMO,

Alla




From iam.kemper at gmail.com  Sat May 16 19:41:55 2009
From: iam.kemper at gmail.com (kempermentor)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 19:41:55 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Re:_Snape_and_Harry=EF=BF=BDs_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gumtkq+d3h9@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gun4u3+r4um@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186614

> Eggplant:
> In 1999 JKR said "Snape is a very sadistic teacher"
> but that far from settles the matter; she has her
> opinion on the matter and we are free to have our own.

Kemper now:
This reminds me of advise I read that Camille Paglia received from Harold Bloom.  Paraphrasing here so forgive, but it goes something like: Disregard everything an author says especially if it's anything about her writing.  


> Eggplant:
> Rather than continue the debate over the morality
> of Harry torturing people and enjoying it I want
> to ask a very different question: Do you think
> it was artistically wise of JKR to have Harry do
> that, did she have to in a sense force Harry to
> do it or did it come naturally?

Kemper now:
Interesting question.  I think it came naturally, we had seen him attempt it before so it wasn't a surprise.  What seemed forced (out of character) was McG's nonchalance. That was artistically slow-witted of JKR. ::sigh:: It was a popcorn fun read though.

> Eggplant:
> I think it was
> very wise indeed. True it's not what a supernaturally
> moral epic hero would do, but it is what a real flesh
> and blood person would do if they'd have gone
> through as much as Harry had. If in 7 books Harry
> had never once shown a bit of joy in the pain on
> one of his enemy's faces it just wouldn't ring
> true to me because it's in the nature of war.

Kemper now:
Are you speaking as someone who has been in war? 
Either way, I hope you are wrong.  It would make okay the incidences at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.  I like to believe that those are isolated events, that US soldiers don't enjoy killing/torture/mistreatment.  I would also want our Minerva McGovernment to *question* those actions whenever they occur.  The Carrows are not people to be admired.

Kemper




From gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk  Sat May 16 21:20:31 2009
From: gbannister10 at tiscali.co.uk (Geoff Bannister)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 21:20:31 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gumtkq+d3h9@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gunamv+relm@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186615

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "eggplant107" <eggplant107 at ...> wrote:

Eggplant:
> Rather than continue the debate over the morality
> of Harry torturing people and enjoying it I want
> to ask a very different question: Do you think
> it was artistically wise of JKR to have Harry do
> that, did she have to in a sense force Harry to
> do it or did it come naturally? I think it was
> very wise indeed. True it's not what a supernaturally
> moral epic hero would do, but it is what a real flesh
> and blood person would do if they'd have gone
> through as much as Harry had. If in 7 books Harry
> had never once shown a bit of joy in the pain on
> one of his enemy's faces it just wouldn't ring
> true to me because it's in the nature of war.

Geoff:
I have to admit that I agree  with you on this one, but in slightly 
more general terms.

It's not just war. It's life.

I have often said that I identify with Harry so much because 
I can see myself at that age. There were times when something 
generate fury within me when I would literally "see red". To me, 
this term is not metaphorical; it happened. And when it did, I 
would sometimes react in ways which I would never have dreamed 
of when I was calm. Not so much hurting people but wanting to 
express my anger in some outward, violent manner: as an example, 
damaging things in the way that Harry did in Dumbledore's office.

I don't think this is on a par with the institutionalised violence 
which one contributor has mentioned such as occurred in Iraq or 
in civil confrontations but, at a personal level, the phrase "I could 
kill him for this" verges on the truth.

The instances which come easily to my mind with Harry - the 
attempts to curse Bellatrix in the Ministry battle and the attempt to 
get Snape after the Tower incident - I can certainly understand 
because I've known feelings like that myself.

For me, it harks back to our discussions on the Christian faith. No one 
is qualified to be a saviour or a Christ figure. We can all attempt to be 
Christ-like in our lives -and those of us who are Christians are 
commanded by Jesus himself - to love God and love our neighbour 
and seek after good.

But that does not stop the selfish side of us surfacing from time to 
time; greed, envy and, on occasions, an explosion of feelings which 
perhaps gets momentarily out of control because we are human. It is 
not to be condoned or encouraged - which on one or two occasions 
may happen to Harry - but it means that we all have our nastier sides 
to deal with, however good or well-balanced or altruistic we may 
appear to be to others.

I believe personally that there are only two people who know what 
pushes our buttons: ourselves and God. And it all goes back to 
Dumbledore's remarks about what choices we make in handling 
those feelings  that dictate the sort of person we become in the final 
analysis.








From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Sat May 16 21:22:14 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 21:22:14 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gumtkq+d3h9@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gunaq6+8asi@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186616

"eggplant107" <eggplant107 at ...> wrote:
> 
> Carol Wrote:
> 
> > I don't want to argue whether Uncle
> > Vernon is a sadist. But I don't see
> > any evidence that Snape is.
> 
> In 1999 JKR said "Snape is a very sadistic teacher"
> but that far from settles the matter; she has her
> opinion on the matter and we are free to have our own.
>

Steve replies:

"she has her opinion on the matter and we are free to have our own? She's the author for goodness sake.  She has a lot more than just an opinion on the matter, as she created the character of Snape and wrote thousands of words and several dozen scenes him in them.  If JKR says that Snape was a very sadistic teacher, that holds a whole heck of a lot more credence with me and than coming from a reader who for very subjective personal reasons doesn't like what KKR wrote or how she presented a character.  Yes, with all due respect to any fan or reader, you do have the right to personally dislike how an author wrote or views their literary characters to be sure.  But do you have an equal right with the author to interpret the nature of a character created by that author?  I don't think so, and most authors I've talked to sure don't think so. Authors love their readers to have all kinds of reactions to their work, to be sure.  But when a reader equates their opinions of what a character is like as equal to or superior to the literary intention and perception of the author, then I have to side w/ the author.  They wrote it, you didn't. If you want to think of Frodo and Sam as being gay, be my guest, but don't think your opinion on the matter is better than or holds more weight in credibility than Tolkiens does. 

Eggplant continues:
 
> Rather than continue the debate over the morality
> of Harry torturing people and enjoying it I want
> to ask a very different question: Do you think
> it was artistically wise of JKR to have Harry do
> that, did she have to in a sense force Harry to
> do it or did it come naturally? I think it was
> very wise indeed. True it's not what a supernaturally
> moral epic hero would do, but it is what a real flesh
> and blood person would do if they'd have gone
> through as much as Harry had. If in 7 books Harry
> had never once shown a bit of joy in the pain on
> one of his enemy's faces it just wouldn't ring
> true to me because it's in the nature of war.
> 
>  Eggplant

Steve replies:  I agree with your assessment of it being wise indeed.  I do agree that it's what a real flesh and blood, or realistically believable hero would do.
>





From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Sat May 16 21:27:49 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 21:27:49 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not WAS: Re: Lack of re-examination
In-Reply-To: <gun1l8+a8td@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gunb4l+c5th@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186617

"a_svirn" <a_svirn at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214@> wrote:
> >
> > > > Alla:
> > > > 
> > > > Are you saying that Snape does not **practice** inflicting emotional pain and that is why he cannot be called a sadist or are you saying something different? 
> > > 
> > > a_svirn:
> > > I am saying that if someone, let say Snape, needs and finds an outlet for his inner needs, so much so that it's become a habit even, then the whole in heart/in practice thing is totally redundant and only obfuscates the matter at hand. If he's cruel that's because he chooses to *act* cruelly. Is heart as cruel as his actions? More cruel? Less cruel? Does it matter? Would it matter if he had a heart of gold if he still bullied Neville mercilessly?
> > >
> > 
> > 
> > Alla:
> > 
> > Ah, ok, sorry I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying that Snape is not a sadist because he does not practice it.  And while I acknowledge that to make a case for Snape as sadist enjoying physical pain is hard, I think that to make a case for him as sadist enjoying emotional pain is a piece of cake, for me of course.
> > 
> > I am following the thread, but do not know if I want to get involved into a whole "murderer at heart" thing. Partly because yes I think it does matter when the person slips and does something bad say once under stress, I would still think that person who is not predisposed to do something has less chance to slip up next time if any.
> 
> a_svirn:
> Which is exactly why I find this "murderer at heart thing", as you say, so disturbing. I believe saying that bullying Neville and making him suffer emotionally constitutes sadism does rather stretch a conventional definition of the term. What bothers me though is that McGonagall who delights in bullying Neville and making him suffer emotionally every bit as much as Snape does somehow escapes the same "sadism" charge. Why? Is it because we are told that she is really a "big softie" very deep down? This is a nice circular argument we have there: because she is not "predisposed" to sadism she is not a sadist and therefore what she does is not sadism by definition.

Steve replies:

Where in canon did it say that McGonagall delighted in bullying Neville and making him suffer emotionally evdry bit as much as Snape does? I don't remember that.  Furthermore, IMO, although  McGonagall was a no nonsense, strict teacher, I didn't see her as delighting in bullying students, but rather holding them accountable for their actions so that they would learn their lessons better and not transfigure themselves into a Volkswagen by mistake. 
>





From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Sat May 16 22:58:22 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 22:58:22 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not WAS: Re: Lack of re-examination
In-Reply-To: <gun2cf+6dai@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gungee+5l5n@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186618

> a_svirn:
> What bothers me though is that McGonagall who delights in bullying Neville and making him suffer emotionally every bit as much as Snape does somehow escapes the same "sadism" charge. Why? Is it because we are told that she is really a "big softie" very deep down? This is a nice circular argument we have there: because she is not "predisposed" to sadism she is not a sadist and therefore what she does is not sadism by definition.
> 
> Alla:
> 
<snip>I absolutely believe that there are character traits people are predisposed to and born with. <snip>
> 
> But of course whole nature/nurture debate is significantly more complicated then that. All that I am saying that I do not find the **idea** of person being predisposed to some things and not to others to be disturbing, that's all.

a_avirn:
I don't find it disturbing either. What I am objecting to is that a person's supposed predisposition is used to evaluate their *actions*. 

> Alla:
> But to go back to Potterland, um, where are you getting that Mcgonagall escapes charge of sadism (from me at least) for the reason you described?
> 
> I agreed in the past that what Mcgonagall does to Neville here is completely horrible and yes, I think borders on abuse.
> 
> But I believe in my mind that what Snape does is worse and I think it is a bona fide reason regardless of how I feel about characters.
> 
> McGonagall does **NOT** single out Neville when she is asking "which incredibly foolish person", doesn't she? I believe that **anybody**, anybody who would have confessed would have gotten exactly same treatment from her.

a_svirn:
But that only means that McGonagall is indiscriminative in her abuse, whereas Snape has some preferences. Still they both indulge in humiliating and inflicting emotional pain on a student ? which in your book amounts to sadism. 

> Alla:
> So, while I do not like the treatment that she gives Neville, I totally think that she does not give a swat whom she disposes punishment to. While I think Snape very much does. I mean, cutting horned toads? Threatening to poison Trevor? Snape would have no chance to give anybody same punishment for the very simple reason that nobody else HAS a toad, no?
> 
> So, yes, I just think what Mcgonagall does here simply cannot be described as sadism and thus not very relevant just as you seem to believe that what Snape does is not sadism.

a_svirn:
You seem to be saying that meeting out abusive and emotionally painful punishments indiscriminativly is not sadism, while doing the same thing to a few select victims is? Not that McGonagall wasn't occasionally creative when it came to punishments. That night's outing to the Forbidden Forest? Not only it literally put her students' lives in jeopardy ? I mean, there was someone out there  desperate enough to kill Unicorns! ? but just imagine how utterly scared Draco must have been! In the Forest at night with his worst enemies and a gigantic gamekeeper who is not known for his love of Slytherins, and who had moreover a grievance  against Draco. I think he was every bit as scared as Neville was when Snape threatened to poison his toad. 




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sun May 17 03:52:05 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 03:52:05 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not WAS: Re: Lack of re-examination
In-Reply-To: <gungee+5l5n@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guo1l5+raet@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186619

a_svirn:
But that only means that McGonagall is indiscriminative in her abuse, whereas
Snape has some preferences. Still they both indulge in humiliating and
inflicting emotional pain on a student ? which in your book amounts to sadism.

Alla:

Not really, no. I see Snape smirking plenty of times when he deals with Harry for example, I do not remember McGonagall once enjoying what she has to do.

The fact that McGonagall is indiscriminative in her punishment  is the reason why I called it borderline abuse, I know it is mirky line, but that is why in my mind it is a **little bit** better than what Snape does, not much of course, just a little bit. Of course if she was enjoying the pain of the students, whether she gives it to everybody or to some people, I would still call it sadism.

Oh and by the way, here is the online definition of sadism that I am working with:
"a sexual perversion in which gratification is obtained by the infliction of physical or mental pain on others (as on a love object) ? compare MASOCHISM2 a: delight in cruelty b: excessive cruelty"


Number two (a) is the one that I think  is applicable to Snape. Number two (b) is rather unconventional of course, so I do not think it is a widely spread definition, but before you ask, yes, if  you think that what McGonagall did was excessive cruelty, it is of course can be applied to her. I think it was cruel, I just do not think  it was excessively cruel. But it is mirky of course.

a_svirn:
You seem to be saying that meeting out abusive and emotionally painful
punishments indiscriminately is not sadism, while doing the same thing to a few
select victims is? 

Alla:

No, I do not, see above

A_svirn:
Not that McGonagall wasn't occasionally creative when it came
to punishments. That night's outing to the Forbidden Forest? Not only it
literally put her students' lives in jeopardy ? I mean, there was someone out
there desperate enough to kill Unicorns! ? but just imagine how utterly scared
Draco must have been! In the Forest at night with his worst enemies and a
gigantic gamekeeper who is not known for his love of Slytherins, and who had
moreover a grievance against Draco. I think he was every bit as scared as
Neville was when Snape threatened to poison his toad.

Alla:

I bet Draco was scared! I however do not remember canon supporting the idea that McGonagall enjoyed him being scared. 





From daughter_of_morgoth at yahoo.com  Sun May 17 03:39:15 2009
From: daughter_of_morgoth at yahoo.com (LunaRaven)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 03:39:15 -0000
Subject: Concerning Apparating
Message-ID: <guo0t3+8t7l@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186620

I'm a new member to this group, and I only joined it to address a
subject cited in the HPfGU FAQ. I'm not an adult yet, or I suppose a
"grown-up"(though I suppose that depends on how you define a person that
has "grown-up"), but I think that I can provide some insight into the
topic. I think allot of problems adults encounter when reading Young
Adult fiction, specifically Young Adult Fantasy, is the problem of
attempting to make "adult" sense of something not initially written for
adults. From the FAQ I quote,

"Where do students learn to Apparate if they cannot Apparate or
Disapparate on the Hogwarts grounds and underage students cannot
practice magic during the holidays? [Yahoo Clubs Messages #6701
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups-Archives/message/6701> ,
6706 <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups-Archives/message/6706>
, 6715
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups-Archives/message/6715> ]
Some members have suggested that the students may take field trips to
Hogsmeade for this purpose. Another member questioned whether the
inability to Apparate or Disapparate on the Hogwarts grounds might be a
myth (despite Hermione's repeated reminders of this ban and Snape's
confirmation of it). [Yahoo Clubs Message #6778
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups-Archives/message/6778> ]"

For starters, the ability to Apparate or Disapparate on Hogwarts grounds
is not a myth. For some reason, many readers I have encountered on
online communities have the tendency to pick apart everything J.K.
writes, even if she writes it absolutely. Basically, if J.K. writes that
wizards cannot apparate of dissapare on Hogwarts grounds, I believe that
she means it. I know that J.K.'s word does not satisfy everyone
however, so I'll offer a bit of logic. Why wouldn't wizards or
witches be able to apparate/dissappate on school grounds? For protection
from people who may want to harm the school from the outside, as well as
to keep students with the ability to apparate on the inside. I highly
doubt this is a myth not only because J.K. says differently, but also
because no defense (whether is be a magical shield or castle gates) is
utilized without it first having been tested. I'm sure that when the
apparition block was installed, it was then tested to see if it actually
worked. So, where do students go to learn how to apparate? For me, the
answer is simple. I don't know why, but I've always been under
the impression that Apparating is very much a wizard's form of
driving. In order to apparate, you need a license. And where do muggle
youth go to learn how to drive? Driving class. So where would a
wizarding youth go to learn how to apparate? Yes, that's
right?an apparating class(ministry controlled no doubt). I believe
that when wizards and witches come off age, they are elligible to sign
up for a ministry-monitored course about apparation. After the course is
completed, students then take the apparating test. It was mentioned in
the books that you can fail the apparating test, just like you can fail
a driver's test. You can also retake it. So, students use magic
under ministry supervision. It is true that underage students cannot
practice magic during the holidays, but when a student turns
seventeen(the age required to obtain a license), they can use magic
legally. This theory is confirmed in the HBP, when it is written that
students of sixteen can take ministry-sponsored classes (like drivers
classes), and students of seventeen who have missed the first test can
take practice tests at Hogsmeade.


LunaRaven




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Sun May 17 14:42:54 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 14:42:54 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination  SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana
In-Reply-To: <gumj81+9g1j@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gup7pe+nuu6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186621


> a_svirn:
> Yes, that's a fine example of Dumledore's peculiar logic. Draco's attempts had been "feeble" only as far as Dumbledore was concerned. They had, however, proved to be very nearly lethal for two people and could have easily brought about more deaths. 

Pippin:
Yes, Draco recklessly endangered his fellow students. But that's pretty much expected behavior from any bright and powerful teenage wizard, never mind a frightened one.  In my culture, the parents would probably have to sign a release saying that they recognize that studying magic in the company of other teens is a potentially lethal activity.  

Dumbledore is not trying to release Draco from accountability, he's trying to get Draco to accept that it's his circumstances and *not* his personality that are driving him to kill. That's true whether you think there is such a thing as a killer at heart or not. But Draco was a juvenile at the time of the attacks, and thus not responsible for his circumstances, nor for deciding whether  his loyalties ought to lie with his headmaster or with the man his parents had taught him to revere above all others. 

IMO, it's obvious that Draco is not like Voldemort, or Fenrir or Bella, who all seem to kill without conscience.  But Draco did not know that - he thought he would find it as easy to kill as they do, and like you, he tried to use what had nearly happened to Katie and Ron as the proof. 

But those attacks were not well-thought out even as random attempts. They should have been stopped by the security measures already in place,  not to mention that had they succeeded against random targets, the school probably would have been closed and Draco's ultimate goal would have been even further out of reach.

A_svirn:
 And his work on the cabinet ... yes, brought about Dumbledore's murder. So judging by Dumbledore's own standards Draco put a lot of ingenuity in the task of murdering him. All of which would seem to point out that he was in fact "a killer at heart" even if he didn't kill in practice. 
> 

Pippin:
How do you reckon that? The only person who died as a result of the cabinet was an unnamed Death Eater.  Snape would have been forced by the vow and by his arrangement with Dumbledore to act whether Draco failed by being reluctant to kill after the cabinet was fixed or failed by not fixing the cabinet.

> a_svirn:
> I am not sure that sadism is an "addiction", actually. But even if we go by your analogy with alcoholism, do you think we should cut some more slack for a non-alcoholic who fought and killed someone while inebriated then to an alcoholic who did the same? 

Pippin:
No, but the most effective method of dealing with one might not be the same as for the other. 

Pippin





From HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com  Sun May 17 16:58:53 2009
From: HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com (HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com)
Date: 17 May 2009 16:58:53 -0000
Subject: Weekly Chat, 5/17/2009, 1:00 pm 
Message-ID: <1242579533.484.18635.m3@yahoogroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186622

Reminder from: HPforGrownups Yahoo! Group
 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/cal

Weekly Chat
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1:00 pm - 1:00 pm
(This event repeats every week.)
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Notes:
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To get to the HPfGU room follow this link:
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From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Sun May 17 17:00:58 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 17:00:58 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not WAS: Re: Lack of re-examination
In-Reply-To: <guo1l5+raet@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gupfsa+o647@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186623

<dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
>
> a_svirn:
> But that only means that McGonagall is indiscriminative in her abuse, whereas
> Snape has some preferences. Still they both indulge in humiliating and
> inflicting emotional pain on a student ? which in your book amounts to sadism.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Not really, no. I see Snape smirking plenty of times when he deals with Harry for example, I do not remember McGonagall once enjoying what she has to do.
> 
> The fact that McGonagall is indiscriminative in her punishment  is the reason why I called it borderline abuse, I know it is mirky line, but that is why in my mind it is a **little bit** better than what Snape does, not much of course, just a little bit. Of course if she was enjoying the pain of the students, whether she gives it to everybody or to some people, I would still call it sadism.
> 
> Oh and by the way, here is the online definition of sadism that I am working with:
> "a sexual perversion in which gratification is obtained by the infliction of physical or mental pain on others (as on a love object) ? compare MASOCHISM2 a: delight in cruelty b: excessive cruelty"
> 
> 
> Number two (a) is the one that I think  is applicable to Snape. Number two (b) is rather unconventional of course, so I do not think it is a widely spread definition, but before you ask, yes, if  you think that what McGonagall did was excessive cruelty, it is of course can be applied to her. I think it was cruel, I just do not think  it was excessively cruel. But it is mirky of course.
> 
> a_svirn:
> You seem to be saying that meeting out abusive and emotionally painful
> punishments indiscriminately is not sadism, while doing the same thing to a few
> select victims is? 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> No, I do not, see above
> 
> A_svirn:
> Not that McGonagall wasn't occasionally creative when it came
> to punishments. That night's outing to the Forbidden Forest? Not only it
> literally put her students' lives in jeopardy ? I mean, there was someone out
> there desperate enough to kill Unicorns! ? but just imagine how utterly scared
> Draco must have been! In the Forest at night with his worst enemies and a
> gigantic gamekeeper who is not known for his love of Slytherins, and who had
> moreover a grievance against Draco. I think he was every bit as scared as
> Neville was when Snape threatened to poison his toad.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> I bet Draco was scared! I however do not remember canon supporting the idea that McGonagall enjoyed him being scared.
>
Steve replies:

    I agree that Draco was scared.  I also don't remember canon supporting the idea that McGonagall enjoyed him being scared, or in general that she enjoyed inflicting pain or punishment on the students.  I think the dsciplinary action by McDonagall was done by the author to have what happened in the happen do so, it furthered the plot.  I don't think a plot device is enough to go into a whirlwind of supposition about McGonagall being sadistic.  In looking at McGonagall's pattern of behavior as a professor, she has the student's best interests at heart and for some teachers that calls for disciplinary measures.  Just because a teacher is strict at times doesn't mean that they are sadistic.  And the students were with an armed Hagrid afterall, they weren't just sent into the forest on their own w/o wands.  




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Sun May 17 20:59:29 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 20:59:29 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not WAS: Re: Lack of re-examination
In-Reply-To: <guo1l5+raet@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guptrh+eh9u@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186624

> a_svirn:
> But that only means that McGonagall is indiscriminative in her abuse, whereas
> Snape has some preferences. Still they both indulge in humiliating and
> inflicting emotional pain on a student ? which in your book amounts to sadism.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Not really, no. I see Snape smirking plenty of times when he deals with Harry for example, I do not remember McGonagall once enjoying what she has to do.

> The fact that McGonagall is indiscriminative in her punishment  is the reason why I called it borderline abuse, I know it is mirky line, but that is why in my mind it is a **little bit** better than what Snape does, not much of course, just a little bit. Of course if she was enjoying the pain of the students, whether she gives it to everybody or to some people, I would still call it sadism.

a_svirn:
I find it hard to believe that she didn't enjoy picking on students, even if she didn't smirk. I mean, why do it in the first place, if you don't like it? Here is a pretty girl exited and full of anticipation waiting for international delegations to arrive. And McGonagall snaps at her so that everyone would hear 'Miss Patil, take that ridiculous thing out of your hair.' I am not saying it's super cruel, but this is exactly the sort of pettiness we are invited to dislike in Snape. Certainly, she didn't *have* to do it. Snape used Neville squeamishness to bully him with horned frogs? McGonagall did the same with Lavender and mice. And Lavender had lived though the trauma of loosing a pet bunny. (Ok, a bunny is not quite the same as a mouse, but still probably close enough to make an impressionable person uncomfortable. And Ron used to have a pet rat, which *is* pretty close.) And while Snape threw "idiot boy" at Neville, she called Lavender silly girl for being squeamish. I suppose `idiot' is somewhat worse than `silly', but that's a kind of difference without much distinction, really. (It may even be a gender thing: Snape calls Hermione silly, rather than idiot.)  Does she *have* to pick on Parvati? Does she *have* to denigrate her students' mental abilities? Does she *have* to make Neville suffer for something that is so obviously out of his control ? bad memory? Quite the contrary ? she has to absolutely make sure that certain adjustments are made to make things easier for him. Instead, she goes out of her way to make life difficult for him and misses no opportunity to draw everyone's attention to his condition. Oh, and by the way, if she had done her duty the situation with the stolen passwords wouldn't have occurred. So not only her punishment was abusive, she was actually scapegoating Neville.

> A_svirn:
> Not that McGonagall wasn't occasionally creative when it came
> to punishments. That night's outing to the Forbidden Forest? Not only it
> literally put her students' lives in jeopardy ? I mean, there was someone out
> there desperate enough to kill Unicorns! ? but just imagine how utterly scared
> Draco must have been! In the Forest at night with his worst enemies and a
> gigantic gamekeeper who is not known for his love of Slytherins, and who had
> moreover a grievance against Draco. I think he was every bit as scared as
> Neville was when Snape threatened to poison his toad.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> I bet Draco was scared! I however do not remember canon supporting the idea that McGonagall enjoyed him being scared.
>

a_svirn:
No? But what was the point of this punishment in your opinion? You'll agree, I am sure, that it was quite extraordinary thing for her to do. Someone/-thing in the Forest was killing Unicorns ? a kind of wizarding analogue of ritual killing of virgins or Christian babies ? obviously that someone was not just evil and dangerous, but exceptionally so. And what does the deputy Headmistress do when this superevil lurking in the Forest? (To say nothing of other not really human-friendly forest residents.) She sends there three eleven year-olds accompanied buy one adult, who has only three years of magical education under his belt. Quite remarkable really. No one can possibly say that she *had* to do it. By rights, she should have been sacked for doing it. So why *did* she do it? Did she expect them to investigate the case? Apprehend the culprit? Hardly. She wanted to scare them senseless. And it defies belief that someone who had invested so much ingenuity into devising the punishment and was willing to take so much risk while doing so did not find satisfaction at the thought of three children scared out of their wits. 




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sun May 17 22:13:48 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 22:13:48 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guptrh+eh9u@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guq26s+o1fl@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186625

> a_svirn:
> I find it hard to believe that she didn't enjoy picking on students, even if she didn't smirk. I mean, why do it in the first place, if you don't like it?  <SNIP>

Alla:

Huh? I certainly do not characterize McGonagall's behavior as picking on students "all the time". As to why do it if you do not like it? Maybe because if you are a teacher, it is your job to discipline your students, whether you like it or not.

Again, please do not get me wrong. I characterise Snape's behavior as abuse and sadism, however, however I certainly realize that not everybody sees it same way - I am just saying that I interpret text as such. I gave an example of why I see Snape as enjoying himself - we are often treated to his smirking when he deals with Harry. I am sure the argument can be made that narrator misinterprets Snape's expressions, for example and thus we do not know whether he is enjoying himself now. HOWEVER, there is a textual support for my intepretation of Snape enjoying himself and I am asking you for textual support of McGonagall enjoying herself, because "why do it if she does not like it", does not really feels like textual support to me. The answer to me is simple - she may do it because she feels she has to.

Believe me, I do NOT like the punishments that Hogwarts employs, really. I think they are cruel and dangerous. I know that they are in line with tradition of British Boarding schools of recent and not so recent past and they fir the story, but I do not like them at all.

But this to me is totally different issue from how different teachers employ them - out of necessity or because they are enjoying themselves.

I agree that Minerva is wrong from time to time as to how she deals with students. I however do not see a single sign of her enjoying herself when she disperses punishments. My opinion of course.


a_svirn:
Here is a pretty girl exited and full of anticipation waiting for international delegations to arrive. And McGonagall snaps at her so that everyone would hear 'Miss Patil, take that ridiculous thing out of your hair.' I am not saying it's super cruel, but this is exactly the sort of pettiness we are invited to dislike in Snape. Certainly, she didn't *have* to do it. <SNIP>

Alla:

Same sort of pettiness? Not in my opinion at all. I mean, I certainly agree that it was wrong of her to do so, to comment on teen's girl appearance. However, however in my time when I went to school we were all have to wear uniforms ( you know - brown dress, etc). If we were expecting important guests in school and my school principal would have thought that I put something on me which makes me look wierd, I would not be surprised at all if she would snap at me. Again, it was wrong of her, she is a woman and should know better, but really, I can totally see how she just wanted her students to look nice in front of international guests. Again, it was a celebration, they were not supposed to wear regular robes, I know, but I still think that this was her motivation.

a_svirn:
Snape used Neville squeamishness to bully him with horned frogs? McGonagall did the same with Lavender and mice. And Lavender had lived though the trauma of loosing a pet bunny. (Ok, a bunny is not quite the same as a mouse, but still probably close enough to make an impressionable person uncomfortable. And Ron used to have a pet rat, which *is* pretty close.) And while Snape threw "idiot boy" at Neville, she called Lavender silly girl for being squeamish. I suppose `idiot' is somewhat worse than `silly', but that's a kind of difference without much distinction, really. <SNIP>

Alla:

Could you please remind me where it happened? I would like to reread it please  if you do not mind and could you please remind me if she knew that Lavender lost her bunny? Thanks.

a_svirn:
Does she *have* to make Neville suffer for something that is so obviously out of his control ? bad memory? Quite the contrary ? she has to absolutely make sure that certain adjustments are made to make things easier for him. Instead, she goes out of her way to make life difficult for him and misses no opportunity to draw everyone's attention to his condition.

Alla:

Goes out of her way? You mean that one punishment? I agree that she did not have to do that, but she did it once. I mean, he had to do it for what? A month? I agree it was bad, but again, I think going out of her way to make his life miserable is a bit of stretching. My opinion of course.

a_svirn:
Oh, and by the way, if she had done her duty the situation with the stolen passwords wouldn't have occurred. So not only her punishment was abusive, she was actually scapegoating Neville.

Alla:

Yes, she was. All I am saying is that she was not singling him out IMO, I think she would have given the same punishment to anybody.


> a_svirn:
> No? But what was the point of this punishment in your opinion? 

Alla:

Um, what was the point of Harry"s detention with Snape? What was the point of whipping the students in the past? What was the point of Ron's detentions?

I would think the point of the detention is to punish a student. I certainly do not think that Hogwarts" punishments carry any educational points or something. But neither do I think that all of them are being used with the reason to enjoy students" sufferings.

a_svirn:
You'll agree, I am sure, that it was quite extraordinary thing for her to do. Someone/-thing in the Forest was killing Unicorns ? a kind of wizarding analogue of ritual killing of virgins or Christian babies ? obviously that someone was not just evil and dangerous, but exceptionally so. And what does the deputy Headmistress do when this superevil lurking in the Forest? <SNIP>

Alla:

Funny though, the first time we hear about this evil being doing stuff, which I agree is extremely dangerous is not from McGonagall but from Hagrid. She considered what they did to be extremely dangerous, I think she wanted them to do some work in the forest which is dangerous, but with adult. I do not remember that she actually knew that somebody was killing Unicorns there.

You would tell me but she is a deputy headmistress, how could she not know and I would say that I would not find it surprising at all. Through the series we see Dumbledore keeping her out of the loop on plenty important things, plenty of order business, about Sirius' indentity, etc. Hagrid tells things to Dumbledore not to her most of the times, I would not be surprised if he chose not to share.

However, if she knew that was horrible of her, no questions about it, if not, I think it is no worse than many other Hogwarts punishments and if she used it because she felt she had to, I am okay with it. As much as I can be okay with Hogwarts' punishments, which is not much.

JMO,

Alla

(




From catlady at wicca.net  Sun May 17 23:06:03 2009
From: catlady at wicca.net (Catlady (Rita Prince Winston))
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 23:06:03 -0000
Subject: GingerNewt/RescuingGoyle/TrustingRemusOrPeter/HarryChildhood/DracoRedemption
Message-ID: <guq58r+ta8r@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186626

Carol wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186548>:

<< McGonagall's fierce insistence that Harry eat a biscuit (I think it was a Ginger Newt), Yeah, that'll solve everything, Professor. :-) >>

Wasn't there speculation on list that the Ginger Newts contained a calming, comforting, or reasonableness potion?

Pippin wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186555>:

<< Do you think Goyle cared that one of the people who saved him from burning to death was a Dark Arts supporter and another had once used the cruciatus curse and they're possibly not sorry about it? Who cares whether they're sorry or not? >>

Shouldn't the bit after "Do you think Goyle cared that one of the people who saved him from burning to death was" be "a Dark Arts *opponent*"? Considering that GOyle himself was a Dark Arts supporter and a Voldemort supporter, he may have been confused about having been saved by an enemy of his side. (Altho', being Goyle, he might be confused even without a reason.)

Carol wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186558>:

<< The only person who wasn't in on the Secret Keeper change was Lupin, which must mean that he also wasn't in on the Secret itself. >>

He could have been let into the Secret by being shown it written in a note by the Secret Keeper in an imitation of Sirius's writing. 

<< So possibly, when he's talking (bitterly and angrily) about James thinking it was dishonorable to distrust his friends, he's not being entirely truthful. >>

Ouch! Does it make a difference if Remus figured that it was Sirius who distrusted him, not James and not Lily? 

<< But Sirius says in the Shrieking Shack that Wormtail had been passing information on the Order to Voldemort for nearly a year before the Potters were killed (which makes it odd that he didn't reveal that information before Dumbledore suggested the Fidelius Charm) >>

I assumed that every time that 'someone' (Wormtail) told Voldemort where the Potters were hiding, one of DD's spies (Snape?) told DD that LV knew, so the Potters moved to a new hiding place many times during that year. Maybe DD suggested the Fidelius because they were running out of hiding places. Or maybe because LV had started getting the information more quickly (due to questioning Wormtail more frequently).

Steve winterfell thinks in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186599>:

<< considering his childhood, that Harry turned out pretty well.>>

What was Dumbledore thinking when he left the Chosen One to be raised like that? 

One theory: he hadn't known that the Dursleys would be so cruel to Harry, and he didn't watch over Harry observantly enough to find out about it, or when he did find out, it was too late to do anything about it. Another theory: he thought that Harry would grow up being compassionate as a result of being on the receiving end of cruelty. Why would he think an unprecedented thing like that?

Carol wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186603>:

<< [Draco] at least wants to do the right thing as far as possible without being tortured or killed. >>

To which, a_svirn replied in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186604>:

<< Does he though? Then what was he doing in the end of DH? Was he not trying to capture Harry and deliver him to his Lord and Master in order to regain his favour? Or, at the very least, sabotage whatever Harry was doing to prevail over Voldemort? >>

I'm pretty sure that Draco followed Harry into the Room of Lost Things because he figured that Harry was going there to fetch a weapon against Voldemort. I think Draco wanted to get the weapon himself so he could trade it to Voldemort for his parents' safe release. I can't think how he could have expected himself to be brave enough to negotiate with Voldemort. To me, even if he had presented the weapon to Voldemort as an unrestricted gift, Voldemort would have been more likely to kill him as a potential threat than to reward him.





From horridporrid03 at yahoo.com  Sun May 17 23:10:04 2009
From: horridporrid03 at yahoo.com (horridporrid03)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 23:10:04 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gug03b+e06o@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guq5gc+6t2f@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186627

> >>Carol earlier:
> > <snip>
> > And Harry isn't given time to rethink it. <snip>

> >>Betsy Hp:
> > But that's why I blame JKR.  She should have *made* time, maybe not the end of GoF, maybe later on in the series, but just some point where Harry reevaluates things. <snip>

> >>Carol again:
> <snip> I think you're forgetting the traumatic events that Harry went through, first in the graveyard and then with "Moody" when he returns. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
No, I'm not. I'm really, really not. :)  I realize Harry had his hands full immediately after Fake!Moody was revealed as evil rather than cool.  What I label a mistake on JKR's part is leaving that as the end of things. (Well, except for the little addendum in the next book that, Death Eater or not, he was still a cool teacher.)

But I think it was a mistake made because JKR herself didn't see any need to reexamine Fake!Moody's actions unless they directly impacted Harry.  IOWs, I don't see anything to suggest JKR wanted or expected her readers to reread the "ferret scene" and feel Draco was actually being badly treated.

> >>Betsy Hp:
> > I'm neither asking for an overarching moral end nor an Aesop's Fable. I'm asking for Harry to *think*, to think about the very things you're saying JKR wanted her reader thinking about. <snip>

> >>Carol:
> But, as I said, Harry is not a good judge of character and he doesn't have time or reason to think about Crouch Jr. once he's been exposed and soul-sucked. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
Harry had *plenty* of time to rethink things!  Years even.  There were plenty of places JKR could have stuck in some scenes where Harry thinks.  Unless, of course, she felt Harry had no reason to rethink his reactions to Couch Jr.  After all, his issue with the man is over, so why reread (sorry, rethink *g*) what's been and done?  Which is why I seriously doubt JKR meant for her readers to do an intense rereading of her books.  Everything you need to know she tells the reader (and Harry) at the end of each book.  If there's anything vitally important we need to know a book or two down the series she'll restate it.  For example, Fake!Moody was a good teacher. ;p

> >>Carol, who thinks that Draco's squeals of pain speak for themselves in a rereading of the bouncing ferret scene

Betsy Hp:
I agree.  Many, many thoughtful and careful readers of the series do not.  (See any discussion of this scene on this list.)  And I think those readers are hewing carefully to the text.  Per the text we *shouldn't* be too moved by Draco's pain; he's only getting what he deserves, no matter who's delivering the punishment.

> >>Pippin:
> What we're invited to think through is the larger question of valuing mercy over vengeance, of choosing love over hate. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
How?  The scene encourages the reader to cheer a Death Eater visiting vengeance (not mercy) on a schoolboy, and we're never invited to reexamine it.  At the end of the series we see Harry choose vengeance over mercy (throwing the cruciatus curse is "gallant" in those circumstances), reinforcing the lesson.  Vengeance, if it's being delivered upon those our hero thinks deserves it, is good.  Per these books anyway.

> >>Pippin:
[Harry] isn't refusing moral responsibility, he's learning that it's something people have to grow into.

Betsy Hp:
Just to put that above statement into context (because this conversation is spread out enough that I fear it's easy to loose track *g*) this is in reference to Harry's throwing the cruciatus curse.  Harry throws it to... teach... himself? something? Certainly the one teacher in the room doesn't provide any guidance.  Instead she adds her own Unforgivable to the mix (thereby also choosing to refuse any sort of moral responsibility by using another spell to accomplish her task).  So I'm very, very confused at how Harry, a boy we've already established is not prone to think back over actions taken and evaluate their merits, is learning *anything* in this scene (Except that Bellatrix was right, there is a trick to Unforgivables, but clever Harry has figured it out. *g*)  

Especially as this all takes place in the closing chapters of the seven book series and Harry has pretty much accomplished all the growing he's going to do.

Betsy Hp




From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Sun May 17 23:25:00 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 23:25:00 -0000
Subject: Concerning Apparating
In-Reply-To: <guo0t3+8t7l@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guq6cc+j6il@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186628

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "LunaRaven" <daughter_of_morgoth at ...> wrote:
>
> I'm a new member to this group, and I only joined it to address a
> subject cited in the HPfGU FAQ. ...

bboyminn:

An adult or 'grownup' is any one who is willing to come here and 
act like one. So far, so good.

> LunaRaven:
>
> From the FAQ I quote,
> 
> "Where do students learn to Apparate if they cannot Apparate or
> Disapparate on the Hogwarts grounds and underage students cannot
> practice magic during the holidays? 
> [Yahoo Clubs Messages #6701 -
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups-Archives/message/6701> > 6706 <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups-Archives/message/6706>
> 6715
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups-Archives/message/6715> ]
> Some members have suggested that the students may take field 
> trips to Hogsmeade for this purpose. Another member questioned
> whether the inability to Apparate or Disapparate on the Hogwarts
> grounds might be a myth 
>
> ...EDITED... 
>
> For me, the answer is simple. 
> I don't know why, but I've always been under the impression that
> Apparating is very much a wizard's form of driving. In order 
> to apparate, you need a license. ... So where would a
> wizarding youth go to learn how to apparate? Yes, that's
> right?an apparating class(ministry controlled no doubt). I 
> believe that when wizards and witches come off age, they are
> elligible to sign up for a ministry-monitored course about 
> apparation. .... This theory is confirmed in the HBP, when it
> is written that students of sixteen can take ministry-sponsored
> classes (like drivers classes), and students of seventeen who 
> have missed the first test can take practice tests at Hogsmeade.
> 
> 
> LunaRaven
>

bboyminn:

Indeed this was a hotly debated topic at one time. However, 
since the publication of Half-Blood Prince, the details are 
clear. Though certainly there could still be a few things 
unresolved.

In HBP we actually get to see classes in Apparation; classes
instructed by a official from the Ministry. 


We further see - (HBP SPOILER)


...that, as I have said many times, since Dumbledore controls
the enchantments on the castle, he also controls the exceptions.
Dumbledore make exception for the Great Hall, but only during
apparition practice and only within the bounds of the Great Hall.

Trying to Apparate out of the Great Hall, or to or from anywhere
else in the castle would be met with great resistance.


DH SPOILER -

Further, we even see Harry in Deathly Hallows, try to escape 
an anti-apparation jinx. When Harry, Ron, and Hermione arrive
at Hogsmead late in the book. Death Eaters swarm around, and
Harry and his friends try to apparate but can't. 

Now all anti-apparation spells might no be the same, some could
have very dark and dangerous consequences if your try to over
come them. 

So, while it was hotly debated at one time, the issue has now
been resolved in the books, but descriptions in the storyline.

Steve/bboyminn




From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Sun May 17 23:36:32 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 23:36:32 -0000
Subject: Humor in HP - Seem & Unseen; Felt and Unfelt
In-Reply-To: <guf6n5+5jbe@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guq720+gjee@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186629

---  "Geoff Bannister" <gbannister10 at ...> wrote:
>

> Carol:
> > Disillusionment Charm has always bothered me, though, because it's backwards. "I have to Disillusion you" is a great line because of the double meaning (though Harry, of course, isn't really being disillusioned), but, IMO, it ought to be used when the spell that "illusions" Harry is removed, not when it's placed on him. Hope that makes sense!
> 
> Geoff:
> That's not the only "backwards" situation. We have discussed in the 
> past the spell "Enervate" which is used to revive those who have been 
> subjected to something like a Stupefy.
> 
> Enervate is actually defined as "being **drained** of energy".
> 
> > Carol, wondering what CSL is
> 
> Geoff:
> C.S.Lewis.
>


bboyminn:

Actually, I think JKR mixed up two VERY similar words without
actually meaning to. They are also somewhat obscure words so
I could see how an editor or proofreader might miss them.

INNERVATE - 

in?ner?vat?ed, in?ner?vat?ing, in?ner?vates. 1. To supply (an organ or a body part) with nerves. 2. To stimulate (a nerve, muscle, or body part) to action. --in"ner?va"tion n. --in"ner?va"tion?al  adj.


ENERVATE -

en?er?vat?ed, en?er?vat?ing, en?er?vates. 1. To weaken or destroy the strength or vitality of: "the luxury which enervates and destroys nations" (Henry David Thoreau). See Synonyms at  deplete. 2. Medicine. To remove a nerve or part of a nerve. --en?er?vate adj. Deprived of strength; debilitated

So, yes, in my opinion, JKR got the wrong one.


As to Disillusionment vs Illusionment, it would seem that 
disillusionment is the opposite of what happens. When you cast
the spell, you create the illusion of being transparent, of
blending with you background. That is, you creating the illusion
that you are not there, when you actually are.

So, to remove the illusion, you would disillusion.

ILLUSION - 

1.a. An erroneous perception of reality. b. An erroneous concept or belief. 2. The condition of being deceived by a false perception or belief. 3. Something, such as a fantastic plan or desire, that causes an erroneous belief or perception.

Isn't that what happens, you are there, but you create the illusion or preception in others that you are not.

Not that big a point, but one certainly worth making.

Steve/bboyminn 




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Sun May 17 23:54:01 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 23:54:01 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guq26s+o1fl@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guq82p+b1ju@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186630

> > a_svirn:
> > I find it hard to believe that she didn't enjoy picking on students, even if she didn't smirk. I mean, why do it in the first place, if you don't like it?  <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Huh? I certainly do not characterize McGonagall's behavior as picking on students "all the time". As to why do it if you do not like it? Maybe because if you are a teacher, it is your job to discipline your students, whether you like it or not.
<snip> 

> a_svirn:
> Here is a pretty girl exited and full of anticipation waiting for international delegations to arrive. And McGonagall snaps at her so that everyone would hear 'Miss Patil, take that ridiculous thing out of your hair.' I am not saying it's super cruel, but this is exactly the sort of pettiness we are invited to dislike in Snape. Certainly, she didn't *have* to do it. <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Same sort of pettiness? Not in my opinion at all. I mean, I certainly agree that it was wrong of her to do so, to comment on teen's girl appearance. However, however in my time when I went to school we were all have to wear uniforms ( you know - brown dress, etc). If we were expecting important guests in school and my school principal would have thought that I put something on me which makes me look wierd, I would not be surprised at all if she would snap at me. Again, it was wrong of her, she is a woman and should know better, but really, I can totally see how she just wanted her students to look nice in front of international guests. Again, it was a celebration, they were not supposed to wear regular robes, I know, but I still think that this was her motivation.

a_svirn:
OK, I can accept that. But the same is true for Snape as well. He shouldn't have been so rude and generally horrible to Neville, it was totally wrong of him, but his motivation was to make Neville to learn to think for himself without always relying on Hermione. What's wrong with that kind of motivation? Additionally, he must have been justifiably incensed that Neville had brought his pet to the Potions class.  Imagine McGonagall reaction if Harry had brought his owl to one of her classes. She would have probably ordered him to practice vanishing spells on it. 

> 
> a_svirn:
> Snape used Neville squeamishness to bully him with horned frogs? McGonagall did the same with Lavender and mice. And Lavender had lived though the trauma of loosing a pet bunny. (Ok, a bunny is not quite the same as a mouse, but still probably close enough to make an impressionable person uncomfortable. And Ron used to have a pet rat, which *is* pretty close.) And while Snape threw "idiot boy" at Neville, she called Lavender silly girl for being squeamish. I suppose `idiot' is somewhat worse than `silly', but that's a kind of difference without much distinction, really. <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Could you please remind me where it happened? I would like to reread it please  if you do not mind and could you please remind me if she knew that Lavender lost her bunny? Thanks.

a_svirn:
It's in OOtP, Chapter 15 at the start of the class with Umbridge inspecting it. And the entire Gryffindor House knew about that bunny.
 
> 
> a_svirn:
> Does she *have* to make Neville suffer for something that is so obviously out of his control ? bad memory? Quite the contrary ? she has to absolutely make sure that certain adjustments are made to make things easier for him. Instead, she goes out of her way to make life difficult for him and misses no opportunity to draw everyone's attention to his condition.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Goes out of her way? You mean that one punishment? I agree that she did not have to do that, but she did it once. I mean, he had to do it for what? A month? I agree it was bad, but again, I think going out of her way to make his life miserable is a bit of stretching. My opinion of course.

a_svirn:
Yeah, that one punishment that lasted for nearly half the term. And which he didn't really deserve in the first place, since she was the one at fault. How about that time when she pointed out ? with a theatrical sigh and before the entire class ? that his grandmother had sent her the permission form because she didn't trust Neville's memory? She didn't *have* to it this way, did she? But why miss a good opportunity to embarrass a student? 

> 
> > a_svirn:
> > No? But what was the point of this punishment in your opinion? 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Um, what was the point of Harry"s detention with Snape? What was the point of whipping the students in the past? What was the point of Ron's detentions?

a_svirn:
Actually, detentions with Snape and Filch usually had certain pragmatic objectives ? beyond the obvious I mean. Horned toads presumably needed to be sliced, bedpans to be cleaned, etc. It is deeply unpleasant, but a) not humiliating or cruel (in itself, I mean, Neville is a bit of a special case) and b) useful. As for that Forest outing, in term of usefulness it was pointless, and the only purpose it could possible serve was to scare them witless. Which edges quite a bit towards "humiliating" and "cruel" (again in itself).  

> a_svirn:
> You'll agree, I am sure, that it was quite extraordinary thing for her to do. Someone/-thing in the Forest was killing Unicorns ? a kind of wizarding analogue of ritual killing of virgins or Christian babies ? obviously that someone was not just evil and dangerous, but exceptionally so. And what does the deputy Headmistress do when this superevil lurking in the Forest? <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Funny though, the first time we hear about this evil being doing stuff, which I agree is extremely dangerous is not from McGonagall but from Hagrid. She considered what they did to be extremely dangerous, I think she wanted them to do some work in the forest which is dangerous, but with adult. I do not remember that she actually knew that somebody was killing Unicorns there.
> 
> You would tell me but she is a deputy headmistress, how could she not know and I would say that I would not find it surprising at all. Through the series we see Dumbledore keeping her out of the loop on plenty important things, plenty of order business, about Sirius' indentity, etc. Hagrid tells things to Dumbledore not to her most of the times, I would not be surprised if he chose not to share.

a_svirn:
Ok, this is really neat, I'll admit. Then again, one of the students was Draco, and surely Snape must have been informed about the punishment, and Snape knew about the whole Unicorn thing (he even knew who the culprit was). So he must have warned her, most probably argued with her, but was obviously overruled. There. She knew. 

> Alla:
> However, if she knew that was horrible of her, no questions about it, if not, I think it is no worse than many other Hogwarts punishments and if she used it because she felt she had to, I am okay with it. As much as I can be okay with Hogwarts' punishments, which is not much.

a_svirn:
And Snape too did feel that he had to discipline students. I am sure Umbridge felt that she absolutely had to do everything she did. You know what's interesting, though? Flitwick apparently didn't have to bully his students for the Greater Good. Nor did Lupin. Nor did Sprout. Even though they too were Hogwarts professors. 





From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Mon May 18 01:55:56 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 01:55:56 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gunaq6+8asi@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guqf7c+3c43@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186631

> Steve replies:
> "she has her opinion on the matter and we are free to have our own? She's the author for goodness sake.  She has a lot more than just an opinion on the matter, as she created the character of Snape and wrote thousands of words and several dozen scenes him in them. 

Zara:
All of which, I have read 10+ times. How, then, does it matter which of us created him?

> Steve:
> Yes, with all due respect to any fan or reader, you do have the right to personally dislike how an author wrote or views their literary characters to be sure. 

Zara:
It has nothing to do with like or dislike. Carol, who expressed the opinion, appears to be, actually, someone who very much likes the character of Snape, based, from what I can tell, exclusively on how Rowling depicted him in her 7 Harry Potter novels. Carol did not state she dislikes what a sadist Snape was shown to be, she expresses puzzlement at the idea Snape is a sadist.

If you, or Rowling, think Snape is without any doubt a sadist, you are free to point out where this is conclusively demonstrated in the text Rowling wrote. I am sure Carol would be amenable to such an argument.

(And, having read the text in question a few times, I am fairly certain neither of you will be able to produce it).

> Steve:
 But do you have an equal right with the author to interpret the nature of a character created by that author?  

Zara:
Absolutely!

> Steve:
I don't think so, and most authors I've talked to sure don't think so. Authors love their readers to have all kinds of reactions to their work, to be sure.  But when a reader equates their opinions of what a character is like as equal to or superior to the literary intention and perception of the author, then I have to side w/ the author. 

Zara:
Actually, the fact that the author created the character, yadda yadda, in my opinion makes it more difficult for them to have accurate opinions on the matter.

For example, perhaps sitting somewhere in Rowling's copious piles of notes, or dredged out of her imagination at our request, we would find scenes of Snape behaving in an unambiguously sadistic manner. Cutting up fuzzy bunnies with Sectumsempra as a teen. Plotting gleefully in his office how to make Harry more miserable. Or what have you.

*Those scenes, if they exist, did not make it into the books*. Thus, while they may inform Rowling's opinions and statements, they are not *about* the character of Snape that I, and others here, are discussing. He is not a real person Rowling has met and we have not; he exists only in the pages of the HP books, to which we all have equal access.




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Mon May 18 02:24:55 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 02:24:55 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guq82p+b1ju@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guqgtn+pmdb@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186632

> > Alla:
> > 
> > Could you please remind me where it happened? I would like to reread it please  if you do not mind and could you please remind me if she knew that Lavender lost her bunny? Thanks.
> 
> a_svirn:
> It's in OOtP, Chapter 15 at the start of the class with Umbridge inspecting it. And the entire Gryffindor House knew about that bunny.

Alla:

Thanks I will take a look. I know students knew, but was McGonagall present?

> a_svirn:
> Yeah, that one punishment that lasted for nearly half the term. And which he didn't really deserve in the first place, since she was the one at fault. How about that time when she pointed out ? with a theatrical sigh and before the entire class ? that his grandmother had sent her the permission form because she didn't trust Neville's memory? She didn't *have* to it this way, did she? But why miss a good opportunity to embarrass a student? 

Alla:

That one was unexcusable I agree.

>> a_svirn:
> Ok, this is really neat, I'll admit. Then again, one of the students was Draco, and surely Snape must have been informed about the punishment, and Snape knew about the whole Unicorn thing (he even knew who the culprit was). So he must have warned her, most probably argued with her, but was obviously overruled. There. She knew. 

Alla:

So you are saying that Snape would agree to let Draco, student whom he had protected and cherished go if he knew? I would think that at the very least he would have insisted to go with them. But we are just making different inferences here, I obviously think that mine is stronger, but I cannot add anything else on this point and actually on the most points that we are discussing and will just agree to disagree.

> 
> > Alla:
> > However, if she knew that was horrible of her, no questions about it, if not, I think it is no worse than many other Hogwarts punishments and if she used it because she felt she had to, I am okay with it. As much as I can be okay with Hogwarts' punishments, which is not much.
> 
> a_svirn:
> And Snape too did feel that he had to discipline students. I am sure Umbridge felt that she absolutely had to do everything she did. You know what's interesting, though? Flitwick apparently didn't have to bully his students for the Greater Good. Nor did Lupin. Nor did Sprout. Even though they too were Hogwarts professors.
>

Alla:

Um, I am sure biggest sadists are sure that they are doing it for the greater good. I still do not know where in the books you see canon showing McGonagall as enjoying herself. And I already addressed Snape and of course his tone with Harry often shows it. I do not think I seriously need to address Umbridge, I am pretty sure though that in OOP she somewhere described as being pretty close to definition number one - getting off students pain.

I am not sure what your point is about mentioning other teachers though. That they are better? Of course they are, I totally agree with you.

I rank them all above Snape and Mcgonagall, no questions about it, or at least I am not sure I had seen enough Flitwick classes to be sure that he cannot be awfully harsh.

I just rank McGonagall higher than Snape, that is all.

JMO,

Alla




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Mon May 18 07:48:34 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 07:48:34 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guqgtn+pmdb@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gur3si+gnp9@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186633

> Alla:
> 
> So you are saying that Snape would agree to let Draco, student whom he had protected and cherished go if he knew? I would think that at the very least he would have insisted to go with them. 

a_svirn:
Yeah, that's a fair point. Actually, neither interpretation looks entirely convincing. Now that I reread our arguments I think maybe I should exonerate McGonagall on that one. Perhaps, she simply never dreamed of Hagrid taking them to the Forest, Unicorns or no Unicorns. Probably both she and Snape assumed they would weed pumpkins or feed small unpleasant creatures to large unpleasant creatures or something. Of course, this interpretation too leaves a few questions open. I mean, even Hagrid should have known he couldn't pull a stunt like that with a son of the school governor and stay on the job. Then again, he did and he did. Which, by the way, goes a long way towards explaining why Lucius was so hell-bent on removing Dumbledore. He must have been totally beside himself as a parent and very concerned indeed as a governor. He probably felt he *had* to do it, any pleasure he derived from the exercise was entirely coincidental. 

 
> Alla:
> 
> Um, I am sure biggest sadists are sure that they are doing it for the greater good. I still do not know where in the books you see canon showing McGonagall as enjoying herself. 

a_svirn:
I see in the books McGonagall indulging in the same petty bullying as Snape and even singling out the same student for that purpose. A student who is having memory problems he can't help. I strongly believe that you can't tell a sadist from a non-sadist by the way he or she smirks. 

> Alla:
And I already addressed Snape and of course his tone with Harry often shows it.

a_svirn:
Of course Snape had issues with Harry. Any psychoanalyst would have a field day cataloguing them. He mortgaged his soul basically to keep Harry safe and hated him for that. And himself for getting Harry's mother killed. That's an ugly and explosive mix, but sadism? I don't think so. 

> Alla:
> I am not sure what your point is about mentioning other teachers though. That they are better? Of course they are, I totally agree with you.

a_svirn:
The point I was making was that "it was wrong of her, but she felt she had to do it" is a bad argument. The point is it was wrong, and if she felt so then she felt wrong. The difference between McGonagall and Umbridge not in their motivation but in how many lines they were willing to cross to achieve their objectives. 


> Alla: 
> I just rank McGonagall higher than Snape, that is all.

a_svirn:
Well, I don't. I think they are pretty much pot and kettle. 





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Mon May 18 12:35:58 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 12:35:58 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gur3si+gnp9@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gurkne+j49c@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186634

a_svirn:
The point I was making was that "it was wrong of her, but she felt she had to do
it" is a bad argument. The point is it was wrong, and if she felt so then she
felt wrong. The difference between McGonagall and Umbridge not in their
motivation but in how many lines they were willing to cross to achieve their
objectives.

Alla:
You mean of the same degree of badness as why do it if she does not like it argument LOL? But all jokes aside let me try to clarify myself because if you were to consider my argument to be bad, I want you to consider the exact meaning that I intended.

When I said it was wrong of her, but she felt she had to, I did not mean that her inner nature was calling to her, or something like that. I meant that she may have felt that she had no choice as a teacher. Surely we can agree that even best teachers sometimes have these problems of students misbehaving? I would be very surprised if even Sprout escaped it through years, good as she is.

So what is Hogwarts teacher to do if she needs to give punishment? I do not know how they assign detentions, but I am thinking whatever needs to be done in school at the moment (unless you are Umbridge or Snape in my view).

So when I say " it was wrong of her", I did not actually mean that for all of her punishments, I meant that sometimes for all I know in some situations her heart may go out to the student, but she still feels that she has to punish it to make sure or try to make sure student will not do it again. When I say it is wrong of her to embarrass Neville in front of the class, I say it is wrong, period.

But while I do not like password punishment at all, I really do not think that she should have let this one go, woudn't you agree? There is of course the irony that password was stolen from Neville and she is wrong in the first place.

Or when she caught trio off the grounds, she could not just let it go, no? If she knew that Unicorns were killed and let them go, she should be fired, but what if indeed she did not. To me under this condition this punishment really does not look extraordinary under Hogwarts standard.

> 
> > Alla: 
> > I just rank McGonagall higher than Snape, that is all.
> 
> a_svirn:
> Well, I don't. I think they are pretty much pot and kettle.
>

Alla:

I understand this.





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Mon May 18 13:31:13 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 13:31:13 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <guq5gc+6t2f@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gurnv1+ck6a@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186635


> > >>Pippin:
> [Harry] isn't refusing moral responsibility, he's learning that it's something people have to grow into.
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Just to put that above statement into context (because this conversation is spread out enough that I fear it's easy to loose track *g*) this is in reference to Harry's throwing the cruciatus curse.  Harry throws it to... teach... himself? something? Certainly the one teacher in the room doesn't provide any guidance.  Instead she adds her own Unforgivable to the mix (thereby also choosing to refuse any sort of moral responsibility by using another spell to accomplish her task).  So I'm very, very confused at how Harry, a boy we've already established is not prone to think back over actions taken and evaluate their merits, is learning *anything* in this scene (Except that Bellatrix was right, there is a trick to Unforgivables, but clever Harry has figured it out. *g*)  
> 
> Especially as this all takes place in the closing chapters of the seven book series and Harry has pretty much accomplished all the growing he's going to do.

Pippin:
Huh? There are some  major plot and character developments ahead at this point, namely the Prince's Tale and King's Cross. Harry is about to re-think his whole purpose in life, and to seriously revise his opinion of both Dumbledore and Snape. He doesn't review his own actions in the light of what he's learned, that's left for the reader. Certainly everyone active on this list has done that, though we don't all reach the same conclusions, just as we don't all read the same lessons from history in real life. 

I recently read something that put the whole thing in a different perspective for me. Despite years of testing, it's been difficult to document a link between personality type and aggression, though the idea that there is one goes back to the Greeks and their four humors (on which the four Houses are based, per JKR.) People become aggressive based on their circumstances. Aggression is not a stable trait, it's more of an if-then thing. ("Don't!"  May 18 New Yorker magazine.) 

 You can see what it means for the Potterverse if that's true: despite what a lot of characters think, the Sorting shouldn't tell you anything about which people are dangerous. And guess what, it doesn't. Harry knows that by the end, IMO, and the readers can't help but observe it, though we may be extremely puzzled if we think the link ought to be there and we're trying to figure out what it is.  

Harry barely notices the Slytherins except when he thinks they're being aggressive towards him or the people he cares about. Naturally he gets the impression they're always aggressive towards people like him, and the reader gets that impression along with him. 

But his vision is distorted, as we've known all along. Like Snape, he sees what he wants to see. He even revises his opinions in retrospect, so that the Prince, whom he admired for his wit and could forgive for his occasional savagery, suddenly seems to have grown increasingly nasty. Sirius does the same thing with Pettigrew. Which is another thing about re-thinking -- sometimes people had it right the first time.

Any good Slytherins less conspicuous than the immense figure of Slughorn in his brilliant green pajamas are going to be missed because Harry isn't looking at them. And Gryffindors have this tendency to confuse being brave with being reckless, which the Slytherins aren't inclined to be. Harry does rethink that. He recognizes  that in doing what he has to do, he's  being a  reckless godfather, and  he recognizes Snape for his courage.

But it's very sly that Andromeda, who doesn't rush into battle to save the world, survives to raise Teddy, who might otherwise have ended up with his aunt and uncle, as much a freak in Malfoy Manor as Harry ever was at Privet Drive.

The readers have the choice to regard Harry in the comforting  way that his fans in the WW like to see him, as Harry once saw Dumbledore, as a man who believes in truth and justice and would never abuse his power.  Or we can see him as canon actually shows him to us, as a person who would abuse his power under certain circumstances, just like everybody else. 

So you see, we don't get a moment where anyone thinks -- oh, I've been a bad person, I've got to change,  because being a moral person will not in itself help you to control your aggression. It will help you to see that it should be controlled, but most people over the age of two know that, and most people get better at it as they mature. As I've said before, there's scarcely a Death Eater who isn't shown as a baby in some way.

Pippin





From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Mon May 18 13:44:02 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 13:44:02 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gurkne+j49c@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guron2+efk2@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186636

> a_svirn:
> The point I was making was that "it was wrong of her, but she felt she had to do
> it" is a bad argument. The point is it was wrong, and if she felt so then she
> felt wrong. The difference between McGonagall and Umbridge not in their
> motivation but in how many lines they were willing to cross to achieve their
> objectives.
> 
> Alla:
> You mean of the same degree of badness as why do it if she does not like it argument LOL? But all jokes aside let me try to clarify myself because if you were to consider my argument to be bad, I want you to consider the exact meaning that I intended.
> 
> When I said it was wrong of her, but she felt she had to, I did not mean that her inner nature was calling to her, or something like that. I meant that she may have felt that she had no choice as a teacher. Surely we can agree that even best teachers sometimes have these problems of students misbehaving? I would be very surprised if even Sprout escaped it through years, good as she is.
> 
> So what is Hogwarts teacher to do if she needs to give punishment? 

a_svirn:
I don't see any problem with that. If students misbehave teachers assign detentions. That's standard Hogwarts practice. There is nothing inherently bad in slicing toads, cleaning bedpans, scrubbing floors or rearranging Filch's file cabinet. Sprout would make students to prune some particularly disgusting herbs, I imagine. As I've said upthread it is in itself neither degrading, nor cruel. OK, where Neville is concerned assigning one particular in itself totally innocuous detention ? slicing toads ? was insensitive. But then, McGonagall's protracted punishment was insensitive as well. To coin a phrase "I see no difference". Oh, wait, actually I see it. In McGonagall's case the punishment was undeserved. If she felt she "had no choice" but to punish Neville for something that was her fault in the first place, I'd say it is a perfect example of a self-serving justification. 

> Alla:
I do not know how they assign detentions, but I am thinking whatever needs to be done in school at the moment (unless you are Umbridge or Snape in my view).

a_svirn:
Now that's unfair. All detentions Snape ever assigned were entirely in accordance with school policy. He only ever assigned unpleasant chores. Under his own or Filch's supervision. What Umbridge did on the other hand was completely out of bounds. Though as I said, she totally thought she had "no choice" but resorting to such extreme measures. She even said words to that effect on more than one occasion. In the light of which I reiterate my conviction of its being a bad argument:)

> Alla:
<snip>
> But while I do not like password punishment at all, I really do not think that she should have let this one go, woudn't you agree? There is of course the irony that password was stolen from Neville and she is wrong in the first place.

a_svirn:
Considering that she was the one at fault, if she absolutely couldn't have let this one go, she should have tendered her resignation. Then the culprit would have been punished. But I would have rather suggested letting bygones be bygones instead, learning from the experience and moving on. 

> Alla: 
> Or when she caught trio off the grounds, she could not just let it go, no? If she knew that Unicorns were killed and let them go, she should be fired, but what if indeed she did not. 

a_svirn:
Then it's OK with me. But then, I generally have no problem with Snape's detentions either. I have problem with the way he bullied students in class and out, but not with the way he conducted detentions. 







From foxmoth at qnet.com  Mon May 18 14:20:54 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 14:20:54 -0000
Subject: GingerNewt/RescuingGoyle/TrustingRemusOrPeter/HarryChildhood/DracoRedemption
In-Reply-To: <guq58r+ta8r@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gurqs6+b6os@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186637


> 
> Pippin wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186555>:
> 
> << Do you think Goyle cared that one of the people who saved him from burning to death was a Dark Arts supporter and another had once used the cruciatus curse and they're possibly not sorry about it? Who cares whether they're sorry or not? >>

Catlady:
> Shouldn't the bit after "Do you think Goyle cared that one of the people who saved him from burning to death was" be "a Dark Arts *opponent*"? Considering that GOyle himself was a Dark Arts supporter and a Voldemort supporter, he may have been confused about having been saved by an enemy of his side. (Altho', being Goyle, he might be confused even without a reason.)

Pippin:
I was counting Draco as one of the people who saved Goyle. My point was that a willingness to risk your own life to save others is  a stronger indication of human feeling than regret for past acts or beliefs. 

Catlady:
> I assumed that every time that 'someone' (Wormtail) told Voldemort where the Potters were hiding, one of DD's spies (Snape?) told DD that LV knew, so the Potters moved to a new hiding place many times during that year. Maybe DD suggested the Fidelius because they were running out of hiding places. Or maybe because LV had started getting the information more quickly (due to questioning Wormtail more frequently).

Pippin:
Once Peter had the Dark Mark, he could communicate instantly with Voldemort, as could the other marked DE's. This *huge* advantage is probably why the DE's were winning. It must have been galling for Dumbledore, who knew about the mark from Snape, but would have to keep up with the fruitless and useless task of tracking the suspects' movements for appearances' sake. But that also meant that no matter how closely he watched Sirius, Dumbledore could never satisfy himself that Sirius wasn't in contact with Voldemort. 

I think Sirius reminded Dumbledore all too much of Grindelwald: brilliant, handsome, laughing, reckless, a Dark Arts background and a friendship with another boy who was equally brilliant and far too trusting. I think Dumbledore was willing to trust Sirius at first but never really liked him. And maybe he took Pettigrew's loyalty for granted because Pettigrew reminded him of dim but faithful Elphias Doge.

Dumbledore never went to visit Grindelwald or Sirius while they were imprisoned. It could be he was afraid of what he might do to them. Both had harmed people whom Dumbledore loved and he knew there was no one in the wizarding world who would or could call Dumbledore to account if they died. Grindelwald was the person that Dumbledore didn't kill because he didn't have to. Maybe he didn't trust himself to make that choice twice.
 
> Steve winterfell thinks in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186599>:
> 
> << considering his childhood, that Harry turned out pretty well.>>
> 
> What was Dumbledore thinking when he left the Chosen One to be raised like that? 

Catlady:
> One theory: he hadn't known that the Dursleys would be so cruel to Harry, and he didn't watch over Harry observantly enough to find out about it, or when he did find out, it was too late to do anything about it. Another theory: he thought that Harry would grow up being compassionate as a result of being on the receiving end of cruelty. Why would he think an unprecedented thing like that?

Pippin:
It's a myth that most abused children become abusers themselves. Harry is prone to depression and anger, which is a common result of verbal abuse. Dumbledore knew that Harry would suffer, but considered it worth the protection from Voldemort. 


Catlady:
> 
> I'm pretty sure that Draco followed Harry into the Room of Lost Things because he figured that Harry was going there to fetch a weapon against Voldemort. I think Draco wanted to get the weapon himself so he could trade it to Voldemort for his parents' safe release.

Pippin:
I think it was Harry Draco wanted to trade for his parents' return to favor. If so,  he's no worse than Mr. Lovegood. If Draco thought Harry wanted something of value, wouldn't he have tried to get the diadem?

Pippin




From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Mon May 18 14:52:21 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 14:52:21 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gurkne+j49c@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gursn5+bsk6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186638

> Alla:
> When I said it was wrong of [McGonagall], but she felt she had to, I did not mean that her inner nature was calling to her, or something like that. I meant that she may have felt that she had no choice as a teacher. Surely we can agree that even best teachers sometimes have these problems of students misbehaving? I would be very surprised if even Sprout escaped it through years, good as she is.
>
> So what is Hogwarts teacher to do if she needs to give punishment? I do not know how they assign detentions, but I am thinking whatever needs to be done in school at the moment (unless you are Umbridge or Snape in my view).
>
Montavilla47:
Hmm.  I seem to remember that Harry was assigned detention to 
help address Lockhart's fan mail responses.  I doubt that that was 
something that needed to be done for the school.  

Which made me realize something interesting.  McGonagall's 
detentions are almost never served with her, but always with 
another member of the staff.  That's pretty sneaky of her, since 
whatever resentment the kids are going to feel is going to be at
someone else.


Alla:
> So when I say " it was wrong of her", I did not actually mean that for all of her punishments, I meant that sometimes for all I know in some situations her heart may go out to the student, but she still feels that she has to punish it to make sure or try to make sure student will not do it again. When I say it is wrong of her to embarrass Neville in front of the class, I say it is wrong, period.
>

Montavilla47:
What I see hear is that you are projecting feeling onto McGonagall.  We 
don't know what she's feeling.  Nor do we know what Snape is smirking
about (although, I'd say we have more clues about his state of mind
after reading through the books than we have about McGonagall.)

Alla: 
> But while I do not like password punishment at all, I really do not think that she should have let this one go, woudn't you agree? There is of course the irony that password was stolen from Neville and she is wrong in the first place.
> 
> Or when she caught trio off the grounds, she could not just let it go, no? If she knew that Unicorns were killed and let them go, she should be fired, but what if indeed she did not. To me under this condition this punishment really does not look extraordinary under Hogwarts standard.
> 

Montavilla47:

Right, because we see that the punishments at Hogwarts range
from the boring and frustrating (writing addresses or rewriting cards)
to the dangerous (going into the Forbidden Forest) to physical injury
(Umbridge's lines and Filch's thumbscrews).

Now, we know the thumbscrews and whips, which were once 
allowed, are not under Dumbledore.  And we know that Ron (a fair
gauge, I think, of wizarding perspective) felt Umbridge's lines were 
over the line in terms of punishment.

But, social ostracism (Neville forbidden to know the passwords to
the common room), physical danger (the trips to the Forbidden 
Forest), and emotional duress (Harry having to read about his father's
misdeeds or Neville having to disembowel horned toads) is par for
the course.







From foxmoth at qnet.com  Mon May 18 15:27:56 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 15:27:56 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guq82p+b1ju@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gurupt+f5am@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186639


> 
> a_svirn:
> Actually, detentions with Snape and Filch usually had certain pragmatic objectives ? beyond the obvious I mean. Horned toads presumably needed to be sliced, bedpans to be cleaned, etc. It is deeply unpleasant, but a) not humiliating or cruel (in itself, I mean, Neville is a bit of a special case) and b) useful. As for that Forest outing, in term of usefulness it was pointless, and the only purpose it could possible serve was to scare them witless. Which edges quite a bit towards "humiliating" and "cruel" (again in itself).  

Pippin:
The students were being punished for wandering around the school at night, and their punishment had the practical purpose of demonstrating *why* it was  dangerous   for them to be loose without teachers to protect them, without telling them the actual reason, which the students weren't meant to know (although Harry and Hermione do.) 

They were not sent to catch the unicorn hunter, they were supposed to find the wounded unicorn and help it. The unicorn had been attacked several days previously and the hunter should have been long gone. Whatever it was had been stealthy enough to evade both Hagrid and the centaurs -- it wasn't like to show itself on purpose and indeed it did not. As usual Harry failed to follow instructions and didn't send up sparks when he found the dead beast. If he had, then Quirrellmort would have been warned and stayed out of sight.
 

Also, I am confused about the objection to Neville's punishment. He made a list of passwords, which was an obvious and flagrant breach of security, presumably because he didn't like having to wait for someone else  to let him in. His punishment forced him to do just that, so I find it very appropriate. 

Neville must have taken the list outside Gryffindor Tower, even though he didn't lose it there, or he would have known that it must have been stolen from inside. And for that, IMO, he deserved what he got. 

It may be cruel to humiliate students, but it's hardly unusual at Hogwarts. What Harry doesn't like is that Snape so obviously enjoys what he's doing. If Snape had looked sorrowful like Dumbledore or even angry, the way McGonagall does, Harry probably wouldn't mind nearly so much, and might have spoken up for himself more effectively on the occasions when he thought Snape was mistaken.  But he thinks that Snape is only doing it to gratify himself and isn't actually interested in improving Harry's behavior at all.  I think the Prince's Tale shows that is not the case.

Pippin




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Mon May 18 17:29:40 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 17:29:40 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gurupt+f5am@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gus5u4+u75j@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186640

> Pippin:
> The students were being punished for wandering around the school at night, and their punishment had the practical purpose of demonstrating *why* it was  dangerous   for them to be loose without teachers to protect them, without telling them the actual reason, which the students weren't meant to know (although Harry and Hermione do.) 
> 
> They were not sent to catch the unicorn hunter, they were supposed to find the wounded unicorn and help it. 

a_svirn:
And the Unicorn hunter wasn't supposed to find them, while they were supposedly helping wounded Unicorns? Was he supposed to have received an internal memo, asking him to reschedule his nightly outing for a more conventional time? 




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Mon May 18 19:20:58 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 19:20:58 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gus5u4+u75j@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gusceq+3vi7@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186641

Alla:
I do not know how they assign detentions, but I am thinking whatever needs to be
done in school at the moment (unless you are Umbridge or Snape in my view).

a_svirn:
Now that's unfair. All detentions Snape ever assigned were entirely in
accordance with school policy. He only ever assigned unpleasant chores. Under
his own or Filch's supervision. What Umbridge did on the other hand was
completely out of bounds. Though as I said, she totally thought she had "no
choice" but resorting to such extreme measures. She even said words to that
effect on more than one occasion. In the light of which I reiterate my
conviction of its being a bad argument:).

Alla:

I am sorry you feel this way (that this is unfair of me). I however remain convinced that, what was it that you said upthread? That difference between Umbridge and McGonagall is not in their motivations, but in how many lines they are willing to break to achieve their goals?

Well, that is exactly how I feel about Snape and Umbridge. Oh sure, Snape is willing to break less lines to achieve his goals, I am not arguing that. But in their motivations? To me Snape gets off causing some of his students emotional pain and Umbridge physical one. So, sure, Umbridge is the bigger sadist, but to me Snape is one as well, just on the smaller scale.

Snape constantly brings up James several times to Harry, to Harry who is dreaming of having a father, who as we hear even in DH dreams of life he could have had with his parents. And Snape smirks when he does that and he speaks with glee. Yes, to me those are the signs that Snape just may enjoy himself while he is doing so. Knowing that Snape helped James to early grave, really only increases my conviction. Knowing (to my satisfaction of course only) that Snape indeed hated Harry till he died, increases my conviction ten times more. Knowing as you mention that Snape loved Lily increases it hundred times more

There is a reason why I keep pounding on Snape's smirking ? this is to me at least some sign that Snape **enjoys** giving out punishments, I am sorry for being repetitive but I do not remember one line in canon that McGonagall **enjoys** humiliating her students.  She is humiliating them several times, yes, but again, even if it is unconvincing for you, to me ? she does it because she feels she has no choice in the matter is good enough to not call her a sadist. It is interpretation of course, but you just did not point me to any canon that shows me the possibility of other interpretation and just her actions to me are not enough.

Again, you get no argument from me that sometimes Minerva McGonagall humiliates her students. I am disagreeing that she likes doing it.

As to Snape's detentions, I will never be able to believe that sorting notes about Marauders' wrong doings served anything else but sadistic purpose. You know, to feel pain that you have no father, etc, look at what he did and think about life you could have with him. 

a_svirn:
And the Unicorn hunter wasn't supposed to find them, while they were supposedly
helping wounded Unicorns? Was he supposed to have received an internal memo,
asking him to reschedule his nightly outing for a more conventional time?

Alla:

LOL, true, if four eleven year olds were sent to the forest with killer on the loose, I find it inexcusable.
Montavilla47:
Hmm. I seem to remember that Harry was assigned detention to
help address Lockhart's fan mail responses. I doubt that that was
something that needed to be done for the school.

Alla:

Sure, I will happily add Lockhart's detentions to the list of those that make no sense to me.

Montavilla47:
What I see hear is that you are projecting feeling onto McGonagall. We
don't know what she's feeling. Nor do we know what Snape is smirking
about (although, I'd say we have more clues about his state of mind
after reading through the books than we have about McGonagall.)

Alla:

Well,  I would not use the word projecting, because I do not believe that I am projecting what I am feeling onto her. I would use the word guessing or interpreting. But of course we do not know what McGonagall is thinking! But to me I just do not see in the text the possibility that she may enjoy her students' being humiliated. So to me that leaves the possibility that she is not enjoying it that is all.

Could it be so that she is? Of course, I just do not see it there. Again, I have no problem acknowledging the interpretation I disagree with it, just show me the text please. Or goodness knows I stated something which was my opinion often enough. I totally respect your right to think that Minerva is a sadist even if there is nothing in the text, I will just disagree that this is an interpretation.

And I am  pretty sure that I said upthread that of course I am interpreting what Snape is feeling, I just think as you said that I  have enough clues for that. 

Montavilla 47:
<SNIP>
But, social ostracism (Neville forbidden to know the passwords to
the common room), physical danger (the trips to the Forbidden
Forest), and emotional duress (Harry having to read about his father's
misdeeds or Neville having to disembowel horned toads) is par for
the course.

Alla:

I would agree that they are par for the course as the punishments I do not like, however I would not agree that they are given with the same motivations in mind and if McGonagall did not know about the killing, I would even say that trip matches the wrongdoing, IMO.





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Mon May 18 20:15:42 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 20:15:42 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gus5u4+u75j@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gusfle+6fdj@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186642

 
> a_svirn:
> And the Unicorn hunter wasn't supposed to find them, while they were supposedly helping wounded Unicorns? Was he supposed to have received an internal memo, asking him to reschedule his nightly outing for a more conventional time?
>

Pippin:
There isn't a "nightly outing" -- there was another dead unicorn a week ago. Hagrid believes there is nothing in the forest that won't avoid him or Fang, and as far as we know that's what McGonagall thinks as well. Nobody at the school suspected that the unicorns were being killed by a wizard with a grudge against Harry. They thought the attacker was in the school, not in the forest. Whatever the centaurs knew,   they weren't talking.

Pippin






From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Mon May 18 21:55:34 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 21:55:34 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <guqf7c+3c43@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guslgm+n2m8@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186643

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Zara" <zgirnius at ...> wrote:
>
> > Steve replies:
> > "she has her opinion on the matter and we are free to have our own? She's the author for goodness sake.  She has a lot more than just an opinion on the matter, as she created the character of Snape and wrote thousands of words and several dozen scenes him in them. 
> 
> Zara:
> All of which, I have read 10+ times. How, then, does it matter which of us created him?


jkoney
It matters because she is the one who created him and has his story in her head/notes. She wrote him with specific thoughts and a certain point of view. At the worst the author can be unable to make you see that point. For me it's Harry naming his son after Snape. That I don't understand, but since she tells me it's true then I will go along with it.


snip
> > Steve:
>  But do you have an equal right with the author to interpret the nature of a character created by that author?  
> 
> Zara:
> Absolutely!

jkoney:
You may be able to interpret the characters as you see fit, but that doesn't mean you are interpreting the way they were intended to be interpreted.

Some people liked Draco in the early books. There was nothing good about him at all in those scenes. He was arrogant, petty, insulting, etc. He would then hide behind Crabbe, Goyle, Snape or his father. How does one see him as a good character at that point?


> 
> > Steve:
> I don't think so, and most authors I've talked to sure don't think so. Authors love their readers to have all kinds of reactions to their work, to be sure.  But when a reader equates their opinions of what a character is like as equal to or superior to the literary intention and perception of the author, then I have to side w/ the author. 
> 
> Zara:
> Actually, the fact that the author created the character, yadda yadda, in my opinion makes it more difficult for them to have accurate opinions on the matter.
> 
> For example, perhaps sitting somewhere in Rowling's copious piles of notes, or dredged out of her imagination at our request, we would find scenes of Snape behaving in an unambiguously sadistic manner. Cutting up fuzzy bunnies with Sectumsempra as a teen. Plotting gleefully in his office how to make Harry more miserable. Or what have you.
> 
> *Those scenes, if they exist, did not make it into the books*. Thus, while they may inform Rowling's opinions and statements, they are not *about* the character of Snape that I, and others here, are discussing. He is not a real person Rowling has met and we have not; he exists only in the pages of the HP books, to which we all have equal access.
>

jkoney:
Again I see it as a either a failure of the author or a failure of the reader. If there isn't enough information it is the authors fault. If the reader is misinterpreting the information that is presented that is due to their own prejudices and there isn't much the author can do except write a five thousand page story with chapters of back history. Very few people would read something like that.




From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Mon May 18 22:14:24 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 22:14:24 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gurupt+f5am@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gusmk0+lsba@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186644

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> Pippin:
>snip>  
> 
> Also, I am confused about the objection to Neville's punishment. He made a list of passwords, which was an obvious and flagrant breach of security, presumably because he didn't like having to wait for someone else  to let him in. His punishment forced him to do just that, so I find it very appropriate. 
> 
> Neville must have taken the list outside Gryffindor Tower, even though he didn't lose it there, or he would have known that it must have been stolen from inside. And for that, IMO, he deserved what he got. 
> 
> It may be cruel to humiliate students, but it's hardly unusual at Hogwarts. What Harry doesn't like is that Snape so obviously enjoys what he's doing. If Snape had looked sorrowful like Dumbledore or even angry, the way McGonagall does, Harry probably wouldn't mind nearly so much, and might have spoken up for himself more effectively on the occasions when he thought Snape was mistaken.  But he thinks that Snape is only doing it to gratify himself and isn't actually interested in improving Harry's behavior at all.  I think the Prince's Tale shows that is not the case.
> 
> Pippin
>
jkoney:
I'm also confused about the objection to Neville's punishment. Let the punishment fit the crime. He was not responsible enough to learn the passwords, then it appears that he wrote them down and lost them. They've already had someone try to break into to the tower. Security is of the upmost importance. There is suspected mad man, a killer on the loose. 

He was not given the passwords because he had shown that he wasn't responsible enough to handle it from the teachers point of view.

I don't think the Prince's tale actually shows us that Snape is doing things to improve Harry's behavior. In fact when asked Snape shows that he is still doing it for Lilly. He doesn't care at all for Harry. In fact he seems more upset that he spent all this time trying to protect Harry (in his own way) only to find out that Harry has to die anyway.




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 00:07:40 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 00:07:40 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gusmk0+lsba@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gust8c+312l@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186645

jkoney:
<SNIP>
I'm also confused about the objection to Neville's punishment. Let the
punishment fit the crime. He was not responsible enough to learn the passwords,
then it appears that he wrote them down and lost them.

Alla:

Sorry, what? Neville was not **responsible** enough to learn the passwords? How does having a poor memory equal lack of responsibility?

And yes, that is the problem, isn??t it? It **appears** that he wrote them down and lost them. Only he did not. I am willing to cut Minerva some slack and not subscribe sadistic intent to her here, since I see no proof of it in the text, but punishment fits the crime?

She was wrong, she did not find out that the crime she accused Neville of, was not the real crime at all.

And I guess by this logic Neville deserves all he gets from Snape in class, doesn??t he? I mean, it is not like he makes perfect potions and Snape yells at him for that. He indeed messes up all the time. I guess he is not responsible enough to learn the ingredients. Sorry, I cannot agree with it at all.

Jkoney:
They've already had
someone try to break into to the tower. Security is of the utmost importance.
There is suspected mad man, a killer on the loose. <SNIP>

Alla:

I think you should tell this to Minerva. ?? Tell her that she should increase security to make sure the suspected mad man is not able to get into the tower.

Pippin:
<SNIP>
Neville must have taken the list outside Gryffindor Tower, even though he didn't
lose it there, or he would have known that it must have been stolen from inside.
And for that, IMO, he deserved what he got. <SNIP>

Alla:
He must have taken the list outside? How do you know that??? So say Neville knew perfectly well that his teacher is completely wrong. Does Neville of his third year strike you as somebody who is willing to stand up and defend himself against teacher??s unfairness? I know I do not see him like that at all.

You mentioned upthread that Harry does not speak for himself when he thinks Snape enjoys punishing him, and I agree. And Harry is more assertive, does he not? In their early years at least. When does Neville **ever** defend himself to the teacher in the third year?

JMO,

Alla





From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Tue May 19 01:01:29 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 01:01:29 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <guqf7c+3c43@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gut0d9+eol5@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186646


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Zara" <zgirnius at ...> wrote:
>
> > Steve replies:
> > "she has her opinion on the matter and we are free to have our own? She's the author for goodness sake.  She has a lot more than just an opinion on the matter, as she created the character of Snape and wrote thousands of words and several dozen scenes him in them. 
> 
> Zara:
> All of which, I have read 10+ times. How, then, does it matter which of us created him?
> 
> > Steve:
> > Yes, with all due respect to any fan or reader, you do have the right to personally dislike how an author wrote or views their literary characters to be sure. 
> 
> Zara:
> It has nothing to do with like or dislike. Carol, who expressed the opinion, appears to be, actually, someone who very much likes the character of Snape, based, from what I can tell, exclusively on how Rowling depicted him in her 7 Harry Potter novels. Carol did not state she dislikes what a sadist Snape was shown to be, she expresses puzzlement at the idea Snape is a sadist.
>
Steve again:

Carol didn't express the opinion, Eggplant did and just quoted something Carol said in the first paragraph of the post.  I responded to Eggplant's post. Carol's feelings about Snape had nothing to do w/ my reply to Eggplant.  Sorry if you were confused, I did mention Eggplant's continuation in my reply, but perhaps could have made it clearer.

Zara continues:
 
> If you, or Rowling, think Snape is without any doubt a sadist, you are free to point out where this is conclusively demonstrated in the text Rowling wrote. I am sure Carol would be amenable to such an argument.
> 
>Steve again:

Actually, I hadn't given much thought as to whether or not Snape was a sadist until reading that JKR thought so. When I read she thought so than I simply accepted that because I believe her word on the matter to have far more credibility than a mere fan or reader.

   
> > Steve earlier:
>  But do you have an equal right with the author to interpret the nature of a character created by that author?  
> 
> Zara:
> Absolutely!
> 
> > Steve earlier:
> I don't think so, and most authors I've talked to sure don't think so. Authors love their readers to have all kinds of reactions to their work, to be sure.  But when a reader equates their opinions of what a character is like as equal to or superior to the literary intention and perception of the author, then I have to side w/ the author. 
> 
> Zara:
> Actually, the fact that the author created the character, yadda yadda, in my opinion makes it more difficult for them to have accurate opinions on the matter.
> 
>SNIP>

Steve again:

Huh? An author is the one person who has the most accurate opinions on the matter.  If you wrote a fanfic story and JKR came online to discuss it and said she knew far better than you did about the motivations of one of your character, how would you feel? Would you say she had a better idea of what you were thinking of while writing your story, why you wrote this or that a certain way?
IF JKR came online to discuss Tigana with you and me, then all three of our opinions would be equally valid.  If Guy Gavriel Kay joined in on the discussion and said he wrote a certain character a certain way for a certain reason, then I'd accept that as truth and whatever you and JKR were saying as opinion.  But if you have so little respect for authors that you consider your own personal opinions on their published material as superior to what they say, then I'm sorry, I just can't understand that way of thinking. 

Steve, who owes a great debt of gratitude to JKR for what she has created and while knowing she isn't a perfect writer, doesn't feel his opinion is close to being equal to hers w/ regard to the Harry Potter universe.    




From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 02:29:03 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 02:29:03 -0000
Subject: Snape, Sadism, and Authorial Intent
In-Reply-To: <gut0d9+eol5@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gut5hf+4mkk@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186647

> Steve again:
> Carol didn't express the opinion, Eggplant did and just quoted something Carol said in the first paragraph of the post.

Zara:
What Carol expressed in the quoted part of her post, is the opinion that Snape is not a sadist. <g>

> Steve:  
> I responded to Eggplant's post. Carol's feelings about Snape had nothing to do w/ my reply to Eggplant.  Sorry if you were confused, I did mention Eggplant's continuation in my reply, but perhaps could have made it clearer.

Zara:
I was not confused. The only thing that is keeping this series of posts on topic, is that we are discussing an interview statement by J. K. Rowling (that Snape is a sadistic teacher) with which it is my contention readers have every reason to disagree. An abstract discussion of what is sometimes called the intentional fallacy, divorced from HP canon, would belong on OT-Chatter.

The most obvious source of evidence, an admission by Snape that he enjoys tormenting his students, is missing. Claims that in particualr scenes he was doing what he was doing because he enjoyed it, I find unpersuasive. For example, in the infamous Trevor the Toad scene, Snape expressed a good deal of frustration with Neville's mistakes. I foound his expression of his motives, as an attempt to get Neville to pay attention in his class, more persuasive. Is he empathetic, kind, and considerate? Heck no, he'd have seen Neville needed to be approached in a completely different manner in that case. But there;s a long way between that and sadism.

> >Steve again:
> Actually, I hadn't given much thought as to whether or not Snape was a sadist until reading that JKR thought so. When I read she thought so than I simply accepted that because I believe her word on the matter to have far more credibility than a mere fan or reader.

Zara:
Whereas I had given my opinion of Snape as a teacher considerable thought, and arrived at an opinon, before I ever read that interview. If she in fact meant Snape was a sadist, I disagree with her. (As I have argued years ago, in contemporary, informal speech, the adjective "sadistic" may be used as a particularly colorful synonym for "mean", which I think is more likely what Rowling actually meant. Especially as she has since stated she likes him!)

> Steve again:
> Huh? An author is the one person who has the most accurate opinions on the matter.  If you wrote a fanfic story and JKR came online to discuss it and said she knew far better than you did about the motivations of one of your character, how would you feel? 

Zara:
Actually, as I write fanfic about her characters, it would not come up. If she came online and explained the reasons I got her characters wrong, I would be extremely interested in those reasons (not to mention flattered!) Mostly, though, I would find her opinions interesting because it would give me insight into the process of her writing, which is interesting to me in its own right, and not because they would inform my reading of her text. Unless, of course, she actually explained scenes from said text in a way I found persuasive. But her interview comments tend not to go that deep. 

I can give an example of an interview comment by her that changed my reading of the text. When she stated that she had always thought of Albus as gay, it was like a lightbulb going off over my head, for me. A few different things that had not been explained to my satisfaction suddenly made all kinds of sense. (Why he fell so hard for Gellert, for example, it had not fully made sense to me before. The notion of *sharing* something like the Hallows had seemed patently ridiculous. But not, perhaps, for lovers/spouses). But I do not find that she has likewise left important pieces out of her writing of Snape, that I would need to consult with her to make sense of what she has written.

(Nor am I saying she failed with Albus. If I had made the leap myself, it would have all made sense without her explanation. That I did not, may well have more to do with limitations in my own personal experiences and background).

> Steve:
> Would you say she had a better idea of what you were thinking of while writing your story, why you wrote this or that a certain way?

Zara:
No. I am not discussing, note, what Rowling was thinking when she wrote something or other. I am discussing, on the basis of what she wrote, what it makes sense for me, or anyone else reading her books, to conclude about them. When she says her story was built around Snape and Dumbledore, I believe her. When she says she had the reason Voldemort would have spared Lily worked out in advance, I believe her. When she asserts that Snape is a sadist, I don't agree. If she said "I wrote Snape as a sadistic character" I would of course believe her, but would suggest she may have failed in this particular, small aspect of her project.

> Steve:
> IF JKR came online to discuss Tigana with you and me, then all three of our opinions would be equally valid.  If Guy Gavriel Kay joined in on the discussion and said he wrote a certain character a certain way for a certain reason, then I'd accept that as truth and whatever you and JKR were saying as opinion.

Zara:
The opinion I would give the most weight would be the one backed by the best support taken from the books we are discussing. But again, I would accept Kay's statement about why he wrote something. This is distinct from accepting his assessment of the meaning of what he *actually* wrote.

> Steve:
> But if you have so little respect for authors that you consider your own personal opinions on their published material as superior to what they say, then I'm sorry, I just can't understand that way of thinking. 

Zara:
Since, as I admitted, I do write fanfiction...I should point out this is a strong influence on my opinion in this matter. Reviewers of my stories have noticed things in them that I never intended. Symbolic meanings for incidents I added for other reasons, double meanings that had not occured to me, etc. Should I tell them they are wrong, when the meanings are quite clearly based upon things that are there in my story? Of course not. They are right, the text contains those things they see in it, even though I did not consciously intend to include them.




From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 02:44:53 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 02:44:53 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <guslgm+n2m8@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gut6f5+go7h@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186648

> jkoney
> It matters because she is the one who created him and has his story in her head/notes. She wrote him with specific thoughts and a certain point of view. At the worst the author can be unable to make you see that point. For me it's Harry naming his son after Snape. That I don't understand, but since she tells me it's true then I will go along with it.

Zara:
That Harry Potter gave the middle name Severus to his son, and did so specifically to name him after Snape, is not an opinion of Rowling's hidden away in her notes or revealed to us in some obscure interview. It is a factual occurence within the series that we are shown in the Epilogue of Deathly Hallows. Either that, or we must suppose Harry deliberately lied to his son and there is some other, obscure to me reason that Al Sev is so named that we will never learn.

> jkoney:
> You may be able to interpret the characters as you see fit, but that doesn't mean you are interpreting the way they were intended to be interpreted.

Zara:
Nor did I state I was. Nor is it important to me that I do so.

> jkoney:
> Some people liked Draco in the early books. There was nothing good about him at all in those scenes. He was arrogant, petty, insulting, etc. He would then hide behind Crabbe, Goyle, Snape or his father. How does one see him as a good character at that point?

Zara:
How else does one see him, as an evil eleven year old boy? We might reasonably fear he will be walking down a path that might one day lead him into evil; that is another matter. We might also suspect something would divert him from such a path. Both would be equally speculative suppositions (and the latter would be more correct, IMNSVHO). 

But I would disagree we saw nothing to like about him. His initial approach to Harry, an unknown boy at Madam Malkin's, revealed him to have been raised in some objectionable views by his family, but was otherwise a reasonable depiction of a boy trying to impress another in an attempt to make a friend.

> jkoney:
> Again I see it as a either a failure of the author or a failure of the reader. 

Zara:
It seems to be a widely held view, that Severus Snape is perhaps Rowling's finest literary creation to date. Yet there are almost as many opinions about this character as there are readers. *This*, you would call a failure by Rowling? I would call it a triumph. <bg>




From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Tue May 19 03:12:24 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 03:12:24 -0000
Subject: Snape, Sadism, and Authorial Intent
In-Reply-To: <gut5hf+4mkk@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gut82o+f3bi@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186649

> > Steve:
> > But if you have so little respect for authors that you consider your own personal opinions on their published material as superior to what they say, then I'm sorry, I just can't understand that way of thinking. 
> 
> Zara:
> Since, as I admitted, I do write fanfiction...I should point out this is a strong influence on my opinion in this matter. Reviewers of my stories have noticed things in them that I never intended. Symbolic meanings for incidents I added for other reasons, double meanings that had not occured to me, etc. Should I tell them they are wrong, when the meanings are quite clearly based upon things that are there in my story? Of course not. They are right, the text contains those things they see in it, even though I did not consciously intend to include them.

Magpie:
Whether a character is good or bad or a sadist or whatever is subjective anyway. If we are supposed to listen to the author on everything, do we have to take on opinions of other time periods or cultures whenever we read a book? We do that all the time. There's probably plenty of opinions about characters that people now think are obviously what's written that are different from the way the author might have seen it in their own time and culture.

Not that it doesn't also apply to modern authors, though. I just read a book where I'm sure the author would consider it canon that the main characters were a sympathetic couple in love and I thought they were a couple of self-obsessed twits. I still consider my opinion correct. But if it came to a fact about the text then yeah, I'd want to go by what's actually written there, but nobody reads books with the author next to them telling them what to think about the characters. In fact when I feel like the author's telling me that I'm more likely to feel the opposite and just feel like the reality of the story's been compromised.

-m




From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 03:47:18 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 03:47:18 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gurupt+f5am@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guta46+7n6o@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186650

> Pippin:
> Also, I am confused about the objection to Neville's punishment. He made a list of passwords, which was an obvious and flagrant breach of security, presumably because he didn't like having to wait for someone else  to let him in. His punishment forced him to do just that, so I find it very appropriate. 
> 
> Neville must have taken the list outside Gryffindor Tower, even though he didn't lose it there, or he would have known that it must have been stolen from inside. And for that, IMO, he deserved what he got.

Montavilla47:
Let's be fair, Pippin.  Unless Neville took the list with him outside
the common room, it wouldn't have been useful at all.  The whole 
point of the list was to provide a password for Neville when he 
forget them.


Pippin:
> It may be cruel to humiliate students, but it's hardly unusual at Hogwarts. What Harry doesn't like is that Snape so obviously enjoys what he's doing. If Snape had looked sorrowful like Dumbledore or even angry, the way McGonagall does, Harry probably wouldn't mind nearly so much, and might have spoken up for himself more effectively on the occasions when he thought Snape was mistaken.  But he thinks that Snape is only doing it to gratify himself and isn't actually interested in improving Harry's behavior at all.  I think the Prince's Tale shows that is not the case.

Montavilla47:

Can you point out the "enjoyment" that Snape shows?  I know he 
seems pleased at perhaps two or three times, but my recollection
is that Snape shows a range of emotions while assigning detentions.

With Neville, he seems mostly exasperated or frustrated.  With 
Ron or Hermione, he's mostly cold.  With Harry, it can be cold, 
angry, or, occasionally smug.







From drednort at alphalink.com.au  Tue May 19 06:56:52 2009
From: drednort at alphalink.com.au (Shaun Hately)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 16:56:52 +1000
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guron2+efk2@eGroups.com>
References: <guron2+efk2@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <5275B2ECD02041759B63CF7C62E236D0@ShaunPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186651

Shaun:
I've been reading the great Sadism debate with interest. I've been lurking 
on the list a lot recently without posting, but reading most things, just 
recharging my Harry Potter batteries so to speak. This particular discussion 
is of the type that always interests me but I decided not to get involved 
for a while because once you enter a discussion you start to help shape it 
and I wanted to see the idea other people brought up to see if they changed 
my views before I posted. Well, I've been lurking long enough and have now 
decided to drop my own two knuts into the discussion.

First of all where am I coming from? Simply put, I am a school teacher and I 
am also an educational theorist. I write and present on educational topics 
and I have a pretty clear knowledge of both the practical side of teaching 
and the theoretical, research etc. My views are not necessarily always 
correct, nor are they necessarily popular but they are certainly strongly 
held views that I am happy to have challenged and defend.

As a teacher, I'm a strict one. I am as strict as I'm allowed to be, and I'd 
be even stricter if conditions allowed it. I don't think I'm a mean teacher, 
but I've been called that at times by students. I'm an effective teacher - 
my students get very good results. As an educational theorist, I am, for the 
most part a conservative and traditionalist.

And as a kid, as a student, I attended a wide range of different schools, 
including a couple that had a lot of characteristics that I also see in 
Hogwarts. I had a couple of teachers who were very similar in style to 
Professor Snape, and others very similar in style to Professor McGonagall 
and both of those groups contained teachers I regard as among the best I 
ever have. So I guess I'm also coming at this from a perspective of wanting 
to give Snape and McGonagall a break.

All right - biases declared, time to start addressing points people have 
made.

Alla:
>
> Are you saying that Snape does not **practice** inflicting emotional > 
> pain and that is why he cannot be called a sadist or are you saying
> something different? I of course cannot give many examples where he
> inflicts physical pain, but the ones where he inflicts emotional pain > 
> (the ones that I intepret as such of course) I can give a plenty. How
> about I will leave the ones with Harry for later and bring the one
> where he assigned neville to cut horned toads (that was their name in
> Gof<yes?). Yeah, I know, he may have needed them cut, no I would
> never ever believe that he could not find any other student to do
> that. I would never ever believe that he could not find another
> detention for Neville.
>
> And that is of course after famous threat to poison Trevis. No, I do
> not care if he really meant to do it. To me what matters is that he
> said it out loud and to me he did it because he wanted to cause
> Neville emotional pain and to me he suceeded very well.

Shaun:

I certainly agree that some of the punishments Snape inflicts are intended 
to cause emotional pain (personally I prefer the word 'distress' to refer to 
emotional effects, but that's semantics in this case).

But I would make the point that just because a teacher uses a punishment 
that they intend to inflict pain (of any sort) does not make the teacher a 
sadist.

Until comparatively recent, throughout the western world, and particularly 
throughout the English speaking part of it, one of the most common way 
teachers punished students was through the infliction of pain. 
Unambiguously - they used corporal punishment which was expressly intended 
to punish by administering physical pain.

I'm 34 years old - and I received such punishment at school. We're not 
talking about ancient history here. There are still parts of both the United 
States and Australia where such punishment is still used in schools. Are all 
the teachers who use and used such methods sadists? I wouldn't say so.

The largest survey involving British schools and punishment and rewards I am 
aware of was done around 1950. 86% of the teachers surveyed at the time 
believed teachers should be allowed to inflict pain as a punishment for at 
least some offences - were 86% of Britain's teachers sadists in 1950? I 
doubt it. My point is simple - just because a teacher believes inflicting 
pain as a punishment is justified in some cases and is prepared to do it, 
doesn't make them a sadist.

I don't use those methods myself because in the schools I teach in they are 
not permitted. But I support their use in theory. I'm no sadist - I just 
believe that the evidence is that such methods are effective in some cases 
at accomplishing a desirable goal. That's a contentious view and plenty of 
other teachers disagree with me - but the point I am making is if I was 
permitted to use such methods and if I used such methods I would be using 
them only in cases where I believed they were genuinely in the best 
interests of my students. Far from being sadistic, I'd be using them out of 
a desire to help my students. Not to harm them but to help them.

What's Snape's motivation? That's the important question and it's one I find 
difficult to answer definitively even to my own satisfaction. But I see some 
evidence that he is trying to do what is in the best interests of his 
students, and no absolutely clear evidence that this isn't his main 
motivation - and personally I'd need a pretty high standard of evidence of 
motivation before I called someone a sadist.

Why did Snape impose the punishments he inflicted on Neville - what had 
Neville done wrong?

Well, Neville got the 'Horned Toad Detention' he received for melting a 
cauldron in potion's class. The sixth time he'd done that.

Now we don't have any particular details on any consequences that arose from 
Neville's melting that cauldon in this case - JKR doesn't give us any. But 
we know from previous incidents - including one in the very first potions 
class - that if a potion is somehow scattered around the room it has 
dangerous side effects. Neville melted a cauldron in that very first class - 
it burnts holes in other people's shoes, and caused him to become covered in 
boils. Melting a cauldron is *dangerous*. It causes danger to yourselves and 
to others. It's not a minor matter.

And Neville did it in his very first class, and he's still doing it three 
years later. And he's done it four times in between.

Now, I think the question might reasonably be asked how culpable Neville is 
for this error. *If* a student repeatedly makes the same mistake over and 
over again, it is possible there is some reason why they keep doing it that 
isn't completely in their control, and I certainly see a case for arguing 
that this is an issue for Neville (and I intend to discuss that a little 
more later in this post). But it's also possible that Neville could avoid 
these accidents - that they are not completely out of his control (again, 
I'll talk about this a little later) and if that is the case, then his 
failure to do so - his failure to correct a problem behaviour that he could 
correct, and which has potentially serious consequences for his own health 
and his own wellbeing, not to mention those of other students around him is 
worthy of fairly severe punishment - in my view anyway. I'm not saying that 
that is necessarily the best way to handle it - but I am not convinced that 
it's a bad way to handle it.

As for the threat to poison Trevor - to be honest, that's almost straight 
out of certain textbooks of teaching. There's a lot of people who believe 
the best way to deal with behavioural problems is to impose 'logical 
consequences' or 'natural consequences' on a student. Many people who are 
opposed to 'old fashioned', punitive ways of dealing with misbehaviour are 
actually the biggest supporters of the logical consequence approach and 
consider it far kinder and far more likely to teach students to modify their 
behaviour. The threat to poison Trevor is straight out of that very popular 
school of classroom discipline. Is the proposed consequence (the death of a 
pet) overly severe in this case (not to mention incredibly unfair to poor 
Trevor, never mind Neville for a moment!)? Yes, I think it is - but again to 
call a teacher who does it sadistic goes way too far in my view. The 
intention may be good.

Alla:
> McGonagall does **NOT** single out Neville when she is asking "which
> incredibly foolish person", doesn't she? I believe that **anybody**,
> anybody who would have confessed would have gotten exactly same
> treatment from her.
>
> So, while I do not like the treatment that she gives Neville, I
> totally think that she does not give a swat whom she disposes
> punishment to. While I think Snape very much does. I mean, cutting
> horned toads? Threatening to poison Trevor? Snape would have no
> chance to give anybody same punishment for the very simple reason
> that nobody else HAS a toad, no?
>
> So, yes, I just think what Mcgonagall does here simply cannot be
> described as sadism and thus not very relevant just as you seem to
> believe that what Snape does is not sadism.

Shaun:

Alla, here you are running up against one of the most controversial issues 
in education theory - whether or not it is fairer to treat all students as 
if they are identical? Or whether or not it is fairer to treat all students 
as individuals with different needs?

"Nothing is more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people."

Now, I am absolutely and unashamedly in the 'individualised education' camp, 
as opposed to the 'one size fits all' approach. I suffered incredibly as a 
child from being stuck in education that treated all kids as if they were 
identical and personally I believe such an approach to education is 
inherently cruel. But again, my viewpoint is not the only viewpoint on this 
and there are plenty of people out there who think 'fairness' means treating 
everybody the same.

This statement you've made seems to me to fall into that category - you're 
prepared to give Professor McGonagall the benefit of the doubt because you 
believe she'd have treated any other student in the same way that she 
treated Neville but you object to Snape's actions because you think he 
specifically targeted his approach towards Neville as an individual.

This isn't really the place for a huge argument over which approach is 
better, but I just want to point out that there is a lot of discussion over 
this - and a *lot* of educators would argue than in this instance, Snape is 
showing the greater insight and the greater care. By individualising his 
disciplinary approach, he increases the chance it will be effective, as 
opposed to just using a standard punishment for a standard case. Nothing is 
crueler than imposing a punishment that is very unlikely to be effective. If 
you have to use punishment, you want it to work and if it's punishment based 
on causing distress, that means you want to make sure it actually does cause 
distress.

(When I was in primary school, I had a teacher who used to punish students 
by giving them extra mathematics problems. I enjoyed the problems so I used 
to do them for fun. One size fits all punishments might work for some kids, 
but they don't work for all).

Steve:
> Furthermore, IMO, although McGonagall was a no nonsense, strict
> teacher, I didn't see her as delighting in bullying students, but
> rather holding them accountable for their actions so that they would > 
> learn their lessons better and not transfigure themselves into a
> Volkswagen by mistake.

Shaun:

Yes, and I see Snape as a non nonsense strict teacher, who holds his 
students accountable for their actions so that they will learn their lessons 
better and not poison themselves or their friends, or make people break out 
in boils, melt other student's cauldrons...

I don't see Snape bullying Neville. I see Snape punishing Neville for 
genuine mistakes. To an extent, I think Snape's approach with Neville is 
pedagogically suspect at times (I think Neville would be more likely to 
respond positively to a gentler approach and... well, I'll get to that 
later) but I can see where he is coming from. Snape's approach may be wrong 
for Neville - but there are plenty of students that it's right for. Once 
again, though, this is another example (and this time it does involve Snape 
doing it) of how a one size fits all approach isn't generally a good 
approach in the classroom. It's not a sign of cruelty or sadism though - 
when I was a kid, this was actually the way I learned best, and touchy feely 
let's-be-nice teachers were just as bad for me as Snape seems to be for 
Neville.

a_svirn:

> You seem to be saying that meeting out abusive and emotionally
> painful punishments indiscriminativly is not sadism, while doing the
> same thing to a few select victims is? Not that McGonagall wasn't
> occasionally creative when it came to punishments. That night's
> outing to the Forbidden Forest? Not only it literally put her
> students' lives in jeopardy - I mean, there was someone out there
> desperate enough to kill Unicorns! - but just imagine how utterly
> scared Draco must have been! In the Forest at night with his worst
> enemies and a gigantic gamekeeper who is not known for his love of
> Slytherins, and who had moreover a grievance against Draco. I think
> he was every bit as scared as Neville was when Snape threatened to
> poison his toad.

Shaun:

I certainly agree a punishment that puts eleven year old children's lives at 
risk is excessive, although in the context of a magical environment when the 
school's Matron can cure injuries far more devastating than Muggle medicine 
seems to be able to manage, I find it somewhat difficult to assess precisely 
how dangerous the Forest Detention really was expected to be. Remember 
Hagrid points out that the students aren't in danger as long as they are 
with him or Fang. Also remember that the intention of the detention was not 
to find what was killin the unicorn, but rather to find the injured 
creature. Because we as readers know what was really there, and we know how 
dangerous it was, I think we may overestimate how dangerous that detention 
was meant to be. There's obviously some danger - but I don't believe anybody 
involved realised how much was involved.

And, yes, in some ways the detention was probably worse for Draco than for 
the others. As I've said "one size fits all" approaches affect different 
kids differently - even completely inoccuous 'normal' school detentions 
affect the kid who lives two hours away from school more than the one who 
lives five minutes away - but as Draco is a bully who loves scaring other 
people for no reason, I find it somewhat hard to sympathise with his added 
distress in this case.

a_svirn:

> I find it hard to believe that she didn't enjoy picking on students,
> even if she didn't smirk. I mean, why do it in the first place, if
> you don't like it?

Shaun:

Because you believe it is in the best interests of the student.

I've punished my students - and I have *never* once enjoyed doing so. In 
fact, generally speaking, I hate it. I didn't go into teaching to make kids 
unhappy. I went in to it because I want to improve things for them.

If a child is misbehaving you need to correct that misbehaviour. You don't 
have to enjoy doing it. In fact, you shouldn't enjoy doing it.

I love teaching in general - but there's still parts of it I don't like. 
Being a good teacher is, in many ways, about being willing to do the bits 
you don't like, not just the bits you enjoy. You're not there solely for 
your own benefit and your own pleasure. You're there for the kids and to 
give them what they need, whether they like it or not.

a_svirn:

> Here is a pretty girl exited and full of anticipation waiting for
> international delegations to arrive. And McGonagall snaps at her so
> that everyone would hear 'Miss Patil, take that ridiculous thing out
> of your hair.' I am not saying it's super cruel, but this is exactly > the 
> sort of pettiness we are invited to dislike in Snape.

Shaun:

Yes, it is, to an extent, you're right - and I think it's just as wrong to 
criticise Snape for doing it as I do to criticise McGonagall in this 
instance. Parvarti is doing the wrong thing. She's reprimanded for it. I'm 
sure she didn't enjoy it, but she's not meant to enjoy it. It's an adverse 
stimulus intended to correct an inappropriate behaviour. It's basic 
behavioural theory.

a_svirn:

> Certainly, she didn't *have* to do it. Snape used Neville
> squeamishness to bully him with horned frogs? McGonagall did the same > 
> with Lavender and mice. And Lavender had lived though the trauma of
> loosing a pet bunny. (Ok, a bunny is not quite the same as a mouse,
> but still probably close enough to make an impressionable person
> uncomfortable. And Ron used to have a pet rat, which *is* pretty
> close.) And while Snape threw "idiot boy" at Neville, she called
> Lavender silly girl for being squeamish. I suppose `idiot' is
> somewhat worse than `silly', but that's a kind of difference without
> much distinction, really. (It may even be a gender thing: Snape calls
> Hermione silly, rather than idiot.) Does she *have* to pick on
> Parvati? Does she *have* to denigrate her students' mental abilities?
> Does she *have* to make Neville suffer for something that is so
> obviously out of his control - bad memory? Quite the contrary - she
> has to absolutely make sure that certain adjustments are made to make
> things easier for him. Instead, she goes out of her way to make life > 
> difficult for him and misses no opportunity to draw everyone's
> attention to his condition. Oh, and by the way, if she had done her
> duty the situation with the stolen passwords wouldn't have occurred.
> So not only her punishment was abusive, she was actually scapegoating
> Neville.

Shaun:

OK - now I'm going to start talking about the thing I said I'd get to later. 
In particular, I'm going to discuss what I believe Neville's learning 
problems are and how they should be appropriately dealt with by teachers. I 
am, for the record, special education trained and have, at times, worked as 
a support teacher for children with learning disabilities.

Let me just tease out what small section of what I've just quoted.

"Does she *have* to make Neville suffer for something that is so obviously 
out of his control - bad memory? Quite the contrary - she has to absolutely 
make sure that certain adjustments are made to make things easier for him."

This is your opinion - and you're entitled to it. But speaking, myself, as a 
teacher, I don't entirely agree with it.

The second part - I don't have that much problem with that, although I would 
phrase it differently. A teacher has a duty to provide accomodations for a 
child with learning disabilities to ensure they can overcome or circumvent 
those difficulties to the extent possible. This does *not* necessarily 
involve making things easier for the child. In fact, sometimes it involves 
making things harder.

To explain what I mean, let me use traditional letter grades (A-E). If a 
child has a learning difficulty that means they get Ds, which is better for 
the child in the long run? An approach which makes things much easier for 
them - and they get Cs? Or an approach that makes things harder for them - 
but they get Bs? You don't want to make learning harder for a child with 
learning disabilities if doing so serves no purpose whatsoever - but 
sometimes by making it harder in particular ways, you can have a better 
impact on the child in the long run.

The first part of the statement you made and I've quoted is the one I do 
disagree with - because it assumes that Neville's memory problems are out of 
his control. I don't believe that is really the case. Yes, the problems are 
real - but he almost certainly has the ability to do something about it.

I believe Neville, as described in the books, has CAPD - central auditory 
processing disorder. It explains his memory problems to a great extent, and 
it certainly explains why he has such difficult in Snape's classes where the 
lessons generally consist of following lists of instructions. CAPD is 
common, and it comes in different degrees. Neville's is actually a pretty 
mild case - he does pass most classes - but unfortunately for him there are 
a few areas where it rears its ugly head - Potions class because of the 
nature of the subject and to some extent because of Snape's teaching style - 
and when it comes to remembering words (auditory sequential information) 
like the passwords.

The thing is CAPD can be managed. Most learning problems can be.

One thing I tell students with LDs is this.

"You have CAPD. That's an explanation for why you find school hard. It's not 
an excuse."

It is unfair in many ways that some children have to overcome difficulties 
that others don't. It is unfair that Hermione finds schoolwork so easy 
(although she works very hard as well) and Neville finds it so hard.

But that's how the world is. Neville has memory problems. There's two things 
he can do in that situation - let those problems dictate his entire future. 
Or fight to find a way to overcome them.

And while a kind teacher might let him get away with the first approach, a 
good teacher will try and force him to take the second.

Now I'll fault Snape to an extent on his teaching style. He's teaching a 
subject that draws heavily on a auditory sequential approach (following 
lists and procedures and learning rote information) and he's teaching it in 
a highly auditory sequential way (reinforced by a kinaesthetic approach if 
you want to get techincal). That's great for any auditory sequential 
learners in the class (Hermione seems to be strongly auditory sequential as 
as well as strongly visual spatial) and not bad for any kinaesthetic 
learners (Harry would likely fall into this category as well as being visual 
spatial), but for somebody like Neville who as I say I think has CAPD - it's 
not good. A teacher ideally, should try to teach in a way that addresses the 
range of learning styles. Snape doesn't do that. A lot of teachers don't 
unfortunately. And Snape doesn't even have the advantage of any real 
training. I think he teaches in the way he learned best - which again, a lot 
of teachers do. And that doesn't work for all kids.

Snape's approach isn't working with Neville, because Snape hasn't identified 
the problem Neville actually has in the classroom. But most teachers aren't 
particularly good at that (I'm specially trained to do so, most teachers are 
not). Snape thinks Neville simply isn't trying hard enough - and to an 
extent, he's probably right, Neville probably could try harder, but only if 
he's given a starting point.

As for McGonagall and the passwords, Neville's memory issues make it harder 
for him to remember passwords. It doesn't make it impossible (if it did, he 
also wouldn't be able to remember people's names, and similar). Now, yes, it 
would be nice if somebody sat down with Neville and taught him some of the 
strategies CAPD people can use in this situation, but the bottom line is, he 
has to overcome this problem and he is capable of doing so.

And remember - he's not being punished because he can't remember the 
password. He's being punished because he wrote them down and he wasn't 
supposed to. That's not the same thing. His difficulty in remembering is not 
his fault. Choosing to write them down however is a deliberate choice.

a_svirn:

> Yeah, that one punishment that lasted for nearly half the term. And
> which he didn't really deserve in the first place, since she was the > one 
> at fault. How about that time when she pointed out - with a
> theatrical sigh and before the entire class - that his grandmother
> had sent her the permission form because she didn't trust Neville's
> memory? She didn't *have* to it this way, did she? But why miss a
> good opportunity to embarrass a student?

Shaun:

Because it's hard for a child to overcome learning difficulties. It's 
*really* hard in a lot of cases. And the only way it can really happen in 
most cases is for the child to *want* to do it.

And most of the time, the end result of *wanting* to do it isn't going to be 
all that spectacular. The child isn't going to wind up doing brilliantly at 
the subject. They are not going to reach the stage where they find it easy. 
So you can't encourage them to work hard to deal with the problem, by 
telling them it's going to be nice and easy and you're going to find things 
easier at the end.

You can't really use an approach of positive encouragement, because the end 
result you are aiming for is - at least to start with - incremental 
improvement rather than dramatic improvement. And if you can't use a 
positive approach to get the child to change, then all you're left with is a 
negative approach.

Making it unpleasant for them not to do well. Imposing unpleasant 
consequences when they don't perform.

It's hard, yes - but if the aim is to improve things for the child in the 
long term, it's the correct approach.

a_svirn:
>
> And Snape too did feel that he had to discipline students. I am sure
> Umbridge felt that she absolutely had to do everything she did. You
> know what's interesting, though? Flitwick apparently didn't have to
> bully his students for the Greater Good. Nor did Lupin. Nor did
> Sprout. Even though they too were Hogwarts professors.

Shaun:

Actually we don't know that at all. We can probably safely assume they 
didn't need to 'bully' Harry, Ron, or Hermione, and maybe even Neville to an 
extent. But we don't know that Flitwick wasn't constantly telling Dean 
Thomas off. We don't know that Professor Sprout doesn't have Crabbe and 
Goyle out digging in the manure pile after every lesson. We don't know these 
things because JKR does not show us every single interaction between 
students and teachers - she only shows us the ones she needs to show us to 
make her story work.

As for Umbridge... my biggest problem with Umbridge is the fact that she 
repeatedly punished Harry for something he wasn't doing. I find the precise 
form the punishment took somewhat disturbing (although in reality I don't 
think it was probably any worse than the canings I received at school a few 
times) on a visceral level, but *if* Harry had actually been lying, it would 
have been another matter. Even then, though, as a teacher if you use a 
particular punishment and it doesn't work the first couple of times you try 
it, you should try something else - even if Umbridge truly believed what she 
was doing was punishing a liar, he just kept on telling the same lie, so she 
should have changed her approach. Nothing is more cruel than a punishment 
that doesn't actually work.

Also - there are some teachers who have some sort of natural gift that means 
they can get away with using punishment a lot less than other teachers. 
That's a wonderful talent for a teacher to have - but those of us who don't 
have that talent can't just decide not to use punishment because we wish we 
didn't have to. Every teacher has to find the methods that work for them as 
a teacher. It's not always the same methods as other teachers have found 
effective. Personally, I'd much rather have a classroom where I never had to 
do anything to a student they didn't like - but when I've tried that, 
everythings collapsed so I couldn't teach effectively. And maybe that's 
because I'm not the best teacher in the world - but I still have to be the 
best teacher I can be. And that means doing what works for me, and gives my 
kids what they need, even if it's not the same as the teacher next door. And 
she shouldn't use my methods if they don't work for her.

So maybe Sprout and Flitwick can teach in a way where they don't need to 
'bully' other students. It doesn't mean McGonagall and Snape would become 
better teachers simply by copying them - anymore than they'd become better 
teachers by copying Snape and McGonagall. Different approaches for different 
teachers are what works. Nobody has yet come up with the perfect unified 
teaching theory.

a_svirn:
>
> I don't see any problem with that. If students misbehave teachers
> assign detentions. That's standard Hogwarts practice.

Shaun:

Yes, and standard practice at my school involved hitting us on the bottoms 
repeatedly with three foot lengths of cane.

Seriously - from a pedagogical point of view, Hogwarts constant use of 
detentions as a way of punishing misbehaviour is not much easier to defend 
than the constant use of the cruciatus charm would be. Or the constant use 
of writing lines.

Schools are most effective at dealing with student misbehaviour when they 
use a wide range of different strategies for dealing with misbehaviour - not 
when they seem to have focused on one. Hogwarts detentions are somewhat 
better than the practice in a lot of Muggle schools where all detentions are 
virtually identical - but it doesn't represent good practice.

a_svirn:
>
> There is nothing inherently bad in slicing toads, cleaning bedpans,
> scrubbing floors or rearranging Filch's file cabinet. Sprout would
> make students to prune some particularly disgusting herbs, I imagine. > As 
> I've said upthread it is in itself neither degrading, nor cruel.

Shaun:

Now, here's where we get into some very interesting issues - who says these 
detentions are neither degrading nor cruel?

To a great extent, that is in the eye of the beholder - there's no simple, 
and clear way you can absolutely compare these things.

What one child will regard as a disagreeable experience, another might find 
absolutely disgusting, and it's not always easy to know which is which.

Seriously - if Neville has CAPD, as I suspect, getting him to rearrange 
Filch's filing cabinet *would* be cruel. It's a task that almost entirely 
draws upon the sequential thought process and a CAPD child would find it 
very distressing. Most kids wouldn't - a child like Hermione would breeze 
through it, in fact - but there are children for whom such a task would 
border on the cruel. Getting a child who suffers from Dabrowskian 
overexcitabilites to prune particularly disgusting herbs, would likewise 
almost certainly cause them considerably more disress than an equivalent 
amount of time writing lines with Umbridge's pen.

And even without special issues applying, remember Harry wanted Ron's 
detention back in Chamber of Secrets because for him, Muggle cleaning was 
nothing to worry about - while for Ron, it was a much more difficult task. 
Not cruel in that case - there's nothing wrong with a punishment being 
difficult - but it illustrates how even seemingly inoccuous punishments can 
effects different students differently. And a surprising amount of the time, 
some things can be 'cruel' even if you don't realise it.

(When I was 10, I found myself in a lunchtime detention that I didn't really 
deserve. The teacher in charge thought she was being kind by telling me I 
could colour in instead of doing the maths problems the other kids had to 
do. She had no way of knowing that colouring in caused me extreme distress 
and a considerable amount of pain - she thought she was being nice to me. 
It's not always all that easy.

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia 




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 11:08:35 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 11:08:35 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <5275B2ECD02041759B63CF7C62E236D0@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <guu3vj+fk50@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186652

> Shaun:
> I've been reading the great Sadism debate with interest. <snip> 
> First of all where am I coming from? Simply put, I am a school teacher and I 
> am also an educational theorist. 

a_svirn:
I'd like to make a disclaimer that I am not a teacher and obviously don't have your experience and expertise. I've done tutoring but that's a different setting. Still I cannot resist answering some of your points from my amateurish perspective. 



> a_svirn:
> 
> > Here is a pretty girl exited and full of anticipation waiting for
> > international delegations to arrive. And McGonagall snaps at her so
> > that everyone would hear 'Miss Patil, take that ridiculous thing out
> > of your hair.' I am not saying it's super cruel, but this is exactly > the 
> > sort of pettiness we are invited to dislike in Snape.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Yes, it is, to an extent, you're right - and I think it's just as wrong to 
> criticise Snape for doing it as I do to criticise McGonagall in this 
> instance. Parvarti is doing the wrong thing. She's reprimanded for it. I'm 
> sure she didn't enjoy it, but she's not meant to enjoy it. It's an adverse 
> stimulus intended to correct an inappropriate behaviour. It's basic 
> behavioural theory.

a_svirn:
I would agree with your every word if I found Parvati behaviour objectionable. Since I don't, it is McGonagall's behaviour I am objecting to. 


> 
> a_svirn:
> 
> > Certainly, she didn't *have* to do it. Snape used Neville
> > squeamishness to bully him with horned frogs? McGonagall did the same > 
> > with Lavender and mice. And Lavender had lived though the trauma of
> > loosing a pet bunny. (Ok, a bunny is not quite the same as a mouse,
> > but still probably close enough to make an impressionable person
> > uncomfortable. And Ron used to have a pet rat, which *is* pretty
> > close.) And while Snape threw "idiot boy" at Neville, she called
> > Lavender silly girl for being squeamish. I suppose `idiot' is
> > somewhat worse than `silly', but that's a kind of difference without
> > much distinction, really. (It may even be a gender thing: Snape calls
> > Hermione silly, rather than idiot.) Does she *have* to pick on
> > Parvati? Does she *have* to denigrate her students' mental abilities?
> > Does she *have* to make Neville suffer for something that is so
> > obviously out of his control - bad memory? Quite the contrary - she
> > has to absolutely make sure that certain adjustments are made to make
> > things easier for him. Instead, she goes out of her way to make life > 
> > difficult for him and misses no opportunity to draw everyone's
> > attention to his condition. Oh, and by the way, if she had done her
> > duty the situation with the stolen passwords wouldn't have occurred.
> > So not only her punishment was abusive, she was actually scapegoating
> > Neville.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> OK - now I'm going to start talking about the thing I said I'd get to later. 
> In particular, I'm going to discuss what I believe Neville's learning 
> problems are and how they should be appropriately dealt with by teachers. I 
> am, for the record, special education trained and have, at times, worked as 
> a support teacher for children with learning disabilities.
> 
> Let me just tease out what small section of what I've just quoted.
> 
> "Does she *have* to make Neville suffer for something that is so obviously 
> out of his control - bad memory? Quite the contrary - she has to absolutely 
> make sure that certain adjustments are made to make things easier for him."
> 
> This is your opinion - and you're entitled to it. But speaking, myself, as a 
> teacher, I don't entirely agree with it.
> 
> The second part - I don't have that much problem with that, although I would 
> phrase it differently. A teacher has a duty to provide accomodations for a 
> child with learning disabilities to ensure they can overcome or circumvent 
> those difficulties to the extent possible. This does *not* necessarily 
> involve making things easier for the child. In fact, sometimes it involves 
> making things harder.


a_svirn:
Fair enough. I should have said "make sure certain adjustments are made to help Neville to overcome his disability" or something to that effect. The point is still valid though that such adjustments were *not* made. Now, I understand that not all teachers have enough time ability or inclination to deal with children with disabilities. However, from my unprofessional point of view if a teacher can't be bothered to make an effort on such students' behalf, the least he or she can do is to try to avoid embarrassing them unnecessarily. Let alone punishing them for something that isn't their fault. 


> Shaun: 
> As for McGonagall and the passwords, Neville's memory issues make it harder 
> for him to remember passwords. It doesn't make it impossible (if it did, he 
> also wouldn't be able to remember people's names, and similar). Now, yes, it 
> would be nice if somebody sat down with Neville and taught him some of the 
> strategies CAPD people can use in this situation, but the bottom line is, he 
> has to overcome this problem and he is capable of doing so.
> 
> And remember - he's not being punished because he can't remember the 
> password. He's being punished because he wrote them down and he wasn't 
> supposed to. That's not the same thing. His difficulty in remembering is not 
> his fault. Choosing to write them down however is a deliberate choice.


a_svirn:
Choosing to write them down was his only resort. Neville had difficulties under normal circumstances, in this instance, however, even students without any learning disabilities were having trouble remembering those frequently changing, crazy multisyllabic passwords. Neville had realistically no chance of pulling it of. McGonagall, who, in my unprofessional view, had moral if not contractual obligation to help him out (especially, since it was a security issue and there was a very real danger out there) had done nothing. What was Neville to do? He hit upon the only sensible option ? wrote them down. And when McGonagall's neglect backfired he was the one who got punished. Seems to me he *was* punished for something he couldn't help. And for McGonagall's professional shortcomings of course. 

> 
> a_svirn:
> 
> > Yeah, that one punishment that lasted for nearly half the term. And
> > which he didn't really deserve in the first place, since she was the > one 
> > at fault. How about that time when she pointed out - with a
> > theatrical sigh and before the entire class - that his grandmother
> > had sent her the permission form because she didn't trust Neville's
> > memory? She didn't *have* to it this way, did she? But why miss a
> > good opportunity to embarrass a student?
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Because it's hard for a child to overcome learning difficulties. It's 
> *really* hard in a lot of cases. And the only way it can really happen in 
> most cases is for the child to *want* to do it.


a_svirn:
Does basic behavioural theory teach that embarrassing students by attracting a class's attention to their disabilities make them want to overcome said disabilities? I must say my own random observations tend to point into the opposite direction. So do the Potter Books. Neville did not excel either in Potions or Transfiguration. However, with teachers who did not find it necessary to bully their students he achieved adequate to excellent results. Those who are strong and able enough might regard adverse stimuli as a challenge, but for those who are already challenged? From what I've seen, usually such stimuli have an adverse effect. 





From drednort at alphalink.com.au  Tue May 19 13:38:37 2009
From: drednort at alphalink.com.au (Shaun Hately)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 23:38:37 +1000
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guu3vj+fk50@eGroups.com>
References: <guu3vj+fk50@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <67A4EAE080724FAC8A9382DFCA6056D8@ShaunPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186653

a_svirn:
> I would agree with your every word if I found Parvati behaviour
> objectionable. Since I don't, it is McGonagall's behaviour I am objecting 
> to.

Shaun:

Fair enough - but I do find Parvarti's behaviour objectionable. Hogwarts has 
a school uniform. She's violating the rules concerning uniform, and so it's 
entirely appropriate for a teacher to reprimand her for doing it. Now I come 
from a cultural background where school uniforms are normal, I wore one from 
the age of five to seventeen, and every school I've taught in has had a 
uniform. I'm generally speaking in favour of uniforms - but only if they are 
properly enforced. If they are not going to be enforced (and that means 
students facing some sort of sanction if they break the rules) they become 
pretty useless. If they are enforced, they are useful in many cases.

The fact is Professor McGonagall is responsible for ensuring the students in 
her class follow the uniform rules. Parvarti was not. That's not appropriate 
behaviour and it's entirely appropriate for a teacher to address it.

a_svirn:
> Fair enough. I should have said "make sure certain adjustments are made
> to help Neville to overcome his disability" or something to that effect. 
> The
> point is still valid though that such adjustments were *not* made. Now, I
> understand that not all teachers have enough time ability or inclination 
> to
> deal with children with disabilities. However, from my unprofessional 
> point
> of view if a teacher can't be bothered to make an effort on such students'
> behalf, the least he or she can do is to try to avoid embarrassing them
> unnecessarily. Let alone punishing them for something that isn't their 
> fault.

Shaun:

Let me be quite clear about this - I *do* believe teachers should work to 
address student's disabilities in the classroom. It's something I actually 
take extremely seriously as a teacher. As a teacher, it concerns me that 
with the exception of the reference to 'Remedial Potions' being used to 
disguise Harry's occlumency lessons, there's no real sign at all that any 
formal effort is made at Hogwarts to address the needs of students who are 
struggling (that reference at least seems to indicate that the concept 
exists).

But here's the thing - the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. 
We don't know that Professor McGonagall isn't giving Neville special help 
outside of normal lessons. For all we know she is. Or something else may 
have been set up to help Neville. The books are not about the education of 
Neville Longbottom (while I'd find such a book fascinating, I don't think it 
would have done as well among the public at large!).

If *all* that has been done to try and address Neville's problems is a 
punitive approach, that's a problem. But it's also an assumption.

>From what we know of Neville's marks, he got an 'Outstanding' in Herbology, 
and 'Exceeds Expectations' in DADA, and Charms, along with an 'Acceptable' 
in Transfiguration.

Well, Harry got an A in Astronomy and failed Divination (he failed History 
of Magic but that was as a result of circumstances). Ron failed two 
subjects - Divination and History of Magic and we know got no Os - I think 
we can assume a mixture of As and Es for him. There's nothing wrong with 
getting an A. It is 'Acceptable'.

Neville does OK in Professor McGonagall's class. I don't see any reason to 
assume she's not teaching him satisfactorily in her class, and if she's 
doing that, I don't see any reason to condemn her for not going easy on him 
outside of class.

a_svirn:
> Choosing to write them down was his only resort. Neville had difficulties 
> under
> normal circumstances, in this instance, however, even students without any
> learning disabilities were having trouble remembering those frequently 
> changing,
> crazy multisyllabic passwords. Neville had realistically no chance of 
> pulling it of.
> McGonagall, who, in my unprofessional view, had moral if not contractual
> obligation to help him out (especially, since it was a security issue and 
> there
> was a very real danger out there) had done nothing. What was Neville to 
> do?
> He hit upon the only sensible option - wrote them down. And when 
> McGonagall's
> neglect backfired he was the one who got punished. Seems to me he *was*
> punished for something he couldn't help. And for McGonagall's professional
> shortcomings of course.

Shaun:

The problem is that Neville didn't just write the passwords down. He wrote 
them down and *then he lost them*. All right - he wasn't supposed to write 
them down, but, yes, I can understand why he did that. I don't think he 
should have done that, but I can understand that that might have seemed to 
him a good idea and I could easily forgive that. But there's two more steps 
in the process which I wouldn't forgive.

The first is that he *lost* them. As you point out, the passwords were a 
security issue. There was (as far as everybody knew) a mad murderer on the 
loose who'd already tried once to get into Gryfindor tower. Even accepting 
that Neville had a reason to write the passwords down, he should have been 
*incredibly* careful of that piece of paper. Poor memory explains a lot of 
things. It doesn't explain carelessness. And I really do believe Neville was 
careless with the paper - we find out later that Crookshanks took it from 
his bedside table - in other words from within the tower. As Neville appears 
to have left the tower subsequent to that theft without even noticing that 
the list was gone, he obviously paying very careful attention to it. And it 
also wasn't serving much purpose - there's no point writing down a list of 
passwords you leave behind inside the place you need them to get into.

McGonagall's question is this:

"Which person, which abysmally foolish person wrote down this week's 
passwords and left them lying around?"

Note that - not just wrote them down, but left them lying around. I can 
understand the first part. The second part is much harder to explain.

But then, there's an even bigger problem. Having realised he'd lost the 
password (and Neville has no idea where they've gone) he has exposed the 
tower to risk. There's a mad murderer on the loose, the security to your 
tower is maintained by passwords and you've lost a list of those passwords. 
Neville should have made sure those in charge knew he'd lost the passwords.

There's a considerable gap in time between the point Neville noticed he'd 
lost the passwords and the time Sirius enters the tower and Professor 
McGonagall subsequently discovers that he had the list of passwords. Neville 
notices the loss of the passwords on Thursday evening - it is not until late 
on the night of Saturday that Sirius enters the tower. Neville had two full 
days to tell somebody in authority that he'd lost one of the things 
protecting him and his fellow students - and he didn't tell them.

I'd also point out that Neville's grandmother seems to think he did 
something wrong as well - she sends him a howler over the incident. It's not 
just Professor McGongall who is angry at Neville - his legal guardian 
agrees. And while Gran does seem a bit of a dragon to me, the fact that a 
child's guardian endorses a punishment is fairly compelling in general 
terms.

a_svirn:
> Does basic behavioural theory teach that embarrassing students by
> attracting a class's attention to their disabilities make them want to
>  overcome said disabilities? I must say my own random observations
> tend to point into the opposite direction. So do the Potter Books.
> Neville did not excel either in Potions or Transfiguration. However,
> with teachers who did not find it necessary to bully their students he
> achieved adequate to excellent results. Those who are strong and able
> enough might regard adverse stimuli as a challenge, but for those who
> are already challenged? From what I've seen, usually such stimuli have
> an adverse effect.

Shaun:

First of all, Neville does achieves adequate results in Professor 
McGonagall's class - he does get an Acceptable OWL. It's not his best 
subject but he does do well enough to pass.

Now to answer your question - behavioural theory does support the idea that 
embarassing a student about underperformance will lead to an improvement in 
performance - provided one particular important criteria is met. The 
student, in question, needs to be male. I believe Neville qualifies. There's 
actually quite a significant difference in how boys respond to such an 
approach as to how girls respond. I can provide references on most of these 
points, by the way, if people are seriously interested, but I'm not going to 
turn this into an academic essay - I will reference this particular point, 
because I have just checked to make sure I'm describing it accurately - 
pages 88-92 of Dr Leonard Sax' "Why Gender Matters" - part of the reason why 
boys academic achievement is declining relative to that of girls in most 
western countries is because teachers are increasingly using strategies that 
work better for girls than for boys in the classroom. The old fashioned, 
traditional 'harder' forms of teaching worked better for boys than for girls 
(not surprisingly as in many cases, educating boys was given a higher 
priority).

It's also key that you have to be talking about 'underperformance'. A boy 
who is already doing as well as they can is not going to miraculously 
improve further because of a negative stimulus. But the boy who is not at 
the limit of his performance potential is likely to. It also needs to be 
within sensible limits - occasional embarassment has very different effects 
from constant humiliation.

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia 




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 13:56:25 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 13:56:25 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <67A4EAE080724FAC8A9382DFCA6056D8@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <guudq9+2d26@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186654

> Shaun:
> 
> Fair enough - but I do find Parvarti's behaviour objectionable. Hogwarts has 
> a school uniform. She's violating the rules concerning uniform, and so it's 
> entirely appropriate for a teacher to reprimand her for doing it. Now I come 
> from a cultural background where school uniforms are normal, I wore one from 
> the age of five to seventeen, and every school I've taught in has had a 
> uniform. I'm generally speaking in favour of uniforms - but only if they are 
> properly enforced. If they are not going to be enforced (and that means 
> students facing some sort of sanction if they break the rules) they become 
> pretty useless. If they are enforced, they are useful in many cases.
> 
> The fact is Professor McGonagall is responsible for ensuring the students in 
> her class follow the uniform rules. Parvarti was not. That's not appropriate 
> behaviour and it's entirely appropriate for a teacher to address it.
<SNIP>

Alla:

Hi Shawn, nice to see you back. I actually need canon clarification on this point, because while just as a_svirn does, I find McGonagall's behavior objectionable here, I may change my mind because I am certainly in favor of school uniforms myself. I thought that for the Ball they did not have to wear uniforms and could dress as they like? I mean, I certainly understand Minerva's desire to make sure her students look ok, but to me that was something in her mind going on and while forgivable, still wrong.

Where do you see in canon that they still had to wear uniforms for the Ball?

Thanks




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 15:44:20 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 15:44:20 -0000
Subject: Hogwarts uniforms WAS: Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guudq9+2d26@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guuk4k+v0hi@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186655

> Alla:
<SNIP>
> Where do you see in canon that they still had to wear uniforms for the Ball?
> 
> Thanks
>


Alla:

Sorry, just realized something. I honestly do not remember that they had to wear uniforms to the Ball, I know Ron got dress robes, but where does it say that they are uniformed, dress robes I mean? His and Harry's looked totally different and nobody reprimanded them, no?

But where does it say that they had to wear their hair the certain way? The certain way and the same way? In fact where does it say that they had to wear their hair the certain way and the same way while they are stidying?

They do not even have to wear their hats all the time, no? I do not remember that it is specified that hair should be done same way.

Hermione's hair is done completely differently at the Ball and nobody, nobody reprimands her.

Thanks,

Alla




From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Tue May 19 15:48:00 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 15:48:00 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <67A4EAE080724FAC8A9382DFCA6056D8@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <guukbg+7tka@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186656

> a_svirn:
> > I would agree with your every word if I found Parvati behaviour
> > objectionable. Since I don't, it is McGonagall's behaviour I am objecting 
> > to.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Fair enough - but I do find Parvarti's behaviour objectionable. Hogwarts has 
> a school uniform. She's violating the rules concerning uniform, and so it's 
> entirely appropriate for a teacher to reprimand her for doing it. Now I come 
> from a cultural background where school uniforms are normal, I wore one from 
> the age of five to seventeen, and every school I've taught in has had a 
> uniform. I'm generally speaking in favour of uniforms - but only if they are 
> properly enforced. If they are not going to be enforced (and that means 
> students facing some sort of sanction if they break the rules) they become 
> pretty useless. If they are enforced, they are useful in many cases.
> 
> The fact is Professor McGonagall is responsible for ensuring the students in 
> her class follow the uniform rules. Parvarti was not. That's not appropriate 
> behaviour and it's entirely appropriate for a teacher to address it.

Magpie:
I don't see anything in that exchange that indicates McGonagall's addressing any sort of school uniform issue. Parvati's wearing a hair clip on her plait. I'm not convinced girls are not allowed to wear ornamental hair clips. It doesn't seem any more elaborate than Luna's cork bottle necklaces or radish earrings.

The way I read the scene McGonagall is simply supposed to be nervous herself and wants the kids to look like she wants them to look like for the foreign visitors--namely, serious. So Ron gets told to straighten his hat and Parvati gets and insulting "Take that ridiculous thing out of your hair." Nothing about any uniform code not allowing ornamental barrettes. She wants her to remove it because it's stupid-looking and she doesn't want it making an impression on her.

I think her reaction to Neville is written to show the same kind of personal irritation too, actually. Sure Neville's done wrong by writing down the passwords and not noticing that they'd been stolen. But I still see McGonagall taking out her frustration and fears on him by humiliating him (she does set him up for constant humiliation for as long as the punishment lasts). I think McGonagall has a pretty consistent pattern of not caring about rules when it benefits her and the kids pick up on that.
 
-m




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 15:53:31 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 15:53:31 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <67A4EAE080724FAC8A9382DFCA6056D8@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <guuklr+6ua5@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186657

> Shaun:
> 
> Fair enough - but I do find Parvarti's behaviour objectionable. Hogwarts has 
> a school uniform. She's violating the rules concerning uniform, and so it's 
> entirely appropriate for a teacher to reprimand her for doing it. Now I come 
> from a cultural background where school uniforms are normal, I wore one from 
> the age of five to seventeen, and every school I've taught in has had a 
> uniform. I'm generally speaking in favour of uniforms - but only if they are 
> properly enforced. If they are not going to be enforced (and that means 
> students facing some sort of sanction if they break the rules) they become 
> pretty useless. If they are enforced, they are useful in many cases.
> 
> The fact is Professor McGonagall is responsible for ensuring the students in 
> her class follow the uniform rules. Parvarti was not. That's not appropriate 
> behaviour and it's entirely appropriate for a teacher to address it.

a_svirn:
But Parvati was wearing uniform, presumably. Otherwise McGonagall would have commented on that too. Parvati hadn't violated any rule or code by securing her hair with a clasp. Just because Hermione couldn't bother with taming her hair, doesn't mean that other girls in Hogwarts didn't wear bands, hairpins or clasps. Or boys for that matter ? we know that Jordan, for instance, sported dreadlocks at some point. McGonagall is not reprimanding her for infringing the rules here, she's disparaging her taste. Petty thing to do, in my humble opinion. 

> a_svirn:
> > Choosing to write them down was his only resort. Neville had difficulties 
> > under
> > normal circumstances, in this instance, however, even students without any
> > learning disabilities were having trouble remembering those frequently 
> > changing,
> > crazy multisyllabic passwords. Neville had realistically no chance of 
> > pulling it of.
> > McGonagall, who, in my unprofessional view, had moral if not contractual
> > obligation to help him out (especially, since it was a security issue and 
> > there
> > was a very real danger out there) had done nothing. What was Neville to 
> > do?
> > He hit upon the only sensible option - wrote them down. And when 
> > McGonagall's
> > neglect backfired he was the one who got punished. Seems to me he *was*
> > punished for something he couldn't help. And for McGonagall's professional
> > shortcomings of course.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> The problem is that Neville didn't just write the passwords down. He wrote 
> them down and *then he lost them*. All right - he wasn't supposed to write 
> them down, but, yes, I can understand why he did that. I don't think he 
> should have done that, but I can understand that that might have seemed to 
> him a good idea and I could easily forgive that. But there's two more steps 
> in the process which I wouldn't forgive.

a_svirn:
Actually he didn't lose it: it was stolen from him. Poirot McGonagall is not. But never mind that. So you wouldn't forgive him for losing the list? Even if you knew full well that his memory disability was the reason of his losing it? And that *your own arrangement* put him into an untenable position? 

> Shaun:
> I'd also point out that Neville's grandmother seems to think he did 
> something wrong as well - she sends him a howler over the incident. It's not 
> just Professor McGongall who is angry at Neville - his legal guardian 
> agrees. And while Gran does seem a bit of a dragon to me, the fact that a 
> child's guardian endorses a punishment is fairly compelling in general 
> terms.

a_svirn:
Only in "general terms". You've just said, however, that she specifically is a bit of dragon. The same can be said of McGonagall. Just because two old dragons have a marriage of true minds, doesn't mean that punishing students for their disabilities is fine. I rather believe that Grans's attitude towards Neville goes a long way to explain his condition. 

 
> a_svirn:
> > Does basic behavioural theory teach that embarrassing students by
> > attracting a class's attention to their disabilities make them want to
> >  overcome said disabilities? I must say my own random observations
> > tend to point into the opposite direction. So do the Potter Books.
> > Neville did not excel either in Potions or Transfiguration. However,
> > with teachers who did not find it necessary to bully their students he
> > achieved adequate to excellent results. Those who are strong and able
> > enough might regard adverse stimuli as a challenge, but for those who
> > are already challenged? From what I've seen, usually such stimuli have
> > an adverse effect.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> First of all, Neville does achieves adequate results in Professor 
> McGonagall's class - he does get an Acceptable OWL. It's not his best 
> subject but he does do well enough to pass.

a_svirn:
But not enough to be admitted to her NEWT class, even though her requirements are considerably less stringent than Snape's. 

> Shaun:
> Now to answer your question - behavioural theory does support the idea that 
> embarassing a student about underperformance will lead to an improvement in 
> performance - provided one particular important criteria is met. The 
> student, in question, needs to be male. I believe Neville qualifies. 

a_svirn:
Yes, but does the male in question need to be a student with disabilities? Which is more to the point in this particular case. 






From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 16:09:40 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 16:09:40 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guukbg+7tka@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guulk4+och8@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186658

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "sistermagpie" <sistermagpie at ...> wrote:
>
> > a_svirn:
> > > I would agree with your every word if I found Parvati behaviour
> > > objectionable. Since I don't, it is McGonagall's behaviour I am objecting 
> > > to.
> > 
> > Shaun:
> > 
> > Fair enough - but I do find Parvarti's behaviour objectionable. Hogwarts has 
> > a school uniform. She's violating the rules concerning uniform, and so it's 
> > entirely appropriate for a teacher to reprimand her for doing it. Now I come 
> > from a cultural background where school uniforms are normal, I wore one from 
> > the age of five to seventeen, and every school I've taught in has had a 
> > uniform. I'm generally speaking in favour of uniforms - but only if they are 
> > properly enforced. If they are not going to be enforced (and that means 
> > students facing some sort of sanction if they break the rules) they become 
> > pretty useless. If they are enforced, they are useful in many cases.
> > 
> > The fact is Professor McGonagall is responsible for ensuring the students in 
> > her class follow the uniform rules. Parvarti was not. That's not appropriate 
> > behaviour and it's entirely appropriate for a teacher to address it.
> 
> Magpie:
> I don't see anything in that exchange that indicates McGonagall's addressing any sort of school uniform issue. Parvati's wearing a hair clip on her plait. I'm not convinced girls are not allowed to wear ornamental hair clips. It doesn't seem any more elaborate than Luna's cork bottle necklaces or radish earrings.
> 

Yeah, and Lavender was offended that Ron would wear the "sweetheart" necklace in public. Obviously ridiculous ornaments weren't banned in Hogwarts. 
a_svirn.




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 17:38:12 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 17:38:12 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gunaq6+8asi@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guuqq4+7etq@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186659

Steve wrote:
> 
> "she has her opinion on the matter and we are free to have our own? She's the author for goodness sake.  She has a lot more than just an opinion on the matter, as she created the character of Snape and wrote thousands of words and several dozen scenes him in them.  If JKR says that Snape was a very sadistic teacher, that holds a whole heck of a lot more credence with me and than coming from a reader who for very subjective personal reasons doesn't like what KKR wrote or how she presented a character.  Yes, with all due respect to any fan or reader, you do have the right to personally dislike how an author wrote or views their literary characters to be sure.  But do you have an equal right with the author to interpret the nature of a character created by that author?  I don't think so, and most authors I've talked to sure don't think so. Authors love their readers to have all kinds of reactions to their work, to be sure.  But when a reader equates their opinions of what a character is like as equal to or superior to the literary intention and perception of the author, then I have to side w/ the author.  They wrote it, you didn't. If you want to think of Frodo and Sam as being gay, be my guest, but don't think your opinion on the matter is better than or holds more weight in credibility than Tolkiens does. 

Carol responds:

I've already expressed my views on this subject on the OT list, so I'll just summarize. Literary critics or analysts (including readers in general on an amateur level) have a choice of whether to consider an author's expressed intentions when they interpret a literary work. No author can be aware of all his own intentions (some are unconscious and so ingrained in the author's thinking that the author is unaware of them); the intentions may change as he or writes; or the intentions may not have been carried out. A simple example of the last category is JKR's intention to bring the Slytherins back into the battle of Hogwarts behind Slughorn. She may see the scene that way in her mind, but many readers who closely examine the text do not. By the same token, some readers don't perceive Dumbledore as gay even though JKR says that she "always thought of him" in that way. In other words, what matters to me and to many professional literary critics is not what the author says about the text or a particular character (especially Snape, about whom she was keeping secrets and whom she wanted her readers to perceive as Harry did until the revelations of "The Prince's Tale," which were *intended* (whether they succeeded or not is another matter) to change the reader's perception of Snape just as they changed Harry's.

If we take JKR's statements about anything, whether it's House Elves or Harry's ideal wife as definitive, we might as well stop discussing the books. But it doesn't work that way. We all bring our own perceptions, values, education, and cultural background to the books, and we are, indeed, free to disagree with any statements that JKR or any author makes with regard to the books and characters. She's not infallible; she makes mistakes (she still doesn't understand why many careful readers talk about "the missing twenty-four hours" in SS/PS; she doesn't always check her facts, so the books are sometimes inconsistent with one another; and, most important, she doesn't always succeed in her intentions. Not all readers will laugh at the lines and scenes that she intends to be humorous. Not all readers will be moved by the scenes that she finds most moving. Not all readers will like the same characters that she likes. (Certainly, few of us still consider Dumbledore to be "the epitome of goodness," whether that statement expresses her true intention or merely what she wanted the readers to think at the time that she spoke those words.)

Sorry--I didn't mean to go on at such length. But a writer's intentions, like those of any artist, are not always clear to the reader even when those intentions are stated. The meaning of a work changes with each reader and over time. (We don't perceive the statues of Phidias the same way that Phidias and the Greeks in general did, even if they still had their original paint.) There would be no point in literary criticism if every reader saw the same book in the same way. No reader--none--can see a book exactly the way that the author intended it to be read. Even JKR may see the books differently on a rereading than she did when she wrote them. It's human nature not only to react to what we read but to interpret and to analyze.

I really don't care how JKR intended me to perceive Snape or Dumbledore or Harry or Ron or Hermione or Dobby or Griphook or any other character. I look at the text itself and, based on my own education and experience, I interpret it. I see, for example, literary devices like the unreliable narrator and analyze the way those devices work in the text whether the author was conscious of using those devices or not.

Carol, who would not want any author, whether it's JKR or Shakespeare or Tolstoy, to dictate her interpretation of a literary work




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 19:08:01 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 19:08:01 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guq26s+o1fl@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guv02h+6j9b@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186660

Alla wrote:
> 
> Huh? I certainly do not characterize McGonagall's behavior as picking on students "all the time". As to why do it if you do not like it? Maybe because if you are a teacher, it is your job to discipline your students, whether you like it or not.
> <snip>

I am asking you for textual support of McGonagall enjoying herself, because "why do it if she does not like it", does not really feels like textual support to me. The answer to me is simple - she may do it because she feels she has to. <snip>

> I agree that Minerva is wrong from time to time as to how she deals with students. I however do not see a single sign of her enjoying herself when she disperses punishments. My opinion of course. <snip>

Carol responds:

Certainly, the Hogwarts teachers are expected to discipline their students and they have three means of doing so that I can think of: an immediate reprimand, point docking, and detentions. Both Snape and McGonagall use all three methods. Even Flitwick resorts to giving Seamus lines that can be construed as insulting on one occasion, something like, "I am a wizard, not a baboon brandishing a stick." 

Both McGonagall and Snape usually limit their detentions to punishments that the students will find unpleasant (but the teachers, in some cases, may find helpful). The exception, of course, is that first detention in the Forbidden Forest. I agree with Alla that McGonagall didn't assign it because she enjoyed the idea of scaring four eleven-year-olds, including Draco. She did it to discipline the students and teach them to obey the rules. (It didn't work, but the detentions never do.)

Many of the teachers in the books are less concerned with students' feelings than we nowadays think teachers ought to be, which is to say, they're not concerned with students' feelings most of the time. There's not much difference between Snape's addressing Neville as "idiot boy" and Karkaroff's addressing Poliokoff as "disgusting boy" except that Snape's provocation (a melted cauldron) is considerably greater than Karkaroff's (food spilled on the student's robes).

And McGonagall has the same tendency. I agree that she was provoked (fearing for her students' safety just as Snape does when Neville melts his cauldrons) when some  "abysmally foolish person" (Neville) loses his list of passwords, but what about her remark to Neville before the TWT, "Longbottom, kindly do not reveal that you can't even perform a simple Switching Spell in front of anyone from Durmstrang!" (GoF Am. ed. 257). I doubt that she's enjoying his humiliation, but nevertheless, she has singled him out as incompetent in front of all the other fourth-year Gryffindors with no concern whatever for his feelings. Trelawney thinks nothing of predicting Harry's death in practically every class and tells Hermione that she's never encountered a student whose mind "is so hopelessly mundane" (PoA am. ed. 298). Hagrid at some point (I can't find it--it's not the hippogriff lesson) calls Draco's questions stupid. None of them, of course, goes to the extremes of Fake!Moody and Umbridge (calling Draco's action cowardly and scummy while bouncing him in ferret form or calling Harry a liar and forcing him to carve "I must not tell lies into his own skin"), and none of them has Filch's gleeful (and largely impersonal) delight in whipping and otherwise torturing students. But all of the regular faculty members I listed (except possibly Flitwick) are much more concerned with enforcing the rules and maintaining discipline than with the students' feelings or self-esteem.

I forgot to mention Slughorn, who is more prone to award points than to dock them but nevertheless quite openly plays favorites (the slug Club in general and Harry in particular), with not even enough interest in an ordinary kid like Ron to learn his name. 

Hogwarts (and, by extension, Durmstrang)isn't as bad as the schools that Dickens satirized in "Nicholas Nickleby" or even early nineteenth-century Eton, in which boys were whipped for such offenses as not knowing Greek. But the teachers are not far in some respects from the French teacher in "Jane Eyre" who refers to Helen Burns as "a dirty girl" who hasn't cleaned her fingernails that morning. In other words, there's nothing modern about their disciplinary methods or their attitude toward students.

Alla:
> 
> Um, what was the point of Harry"s detention with Snape? What was the point of whipping the students in the past? What was the point of Ron's detentions?
> 
> I would think the point of the detention is to punish a student. I certainly do not think that Hogwarts" punishments carry any educational points or something. But neither do I think that all of them are being used with the reason to enjoy students" sufferings. <snip>

Carol responds:
Right. Detention is supposed to punish insubordination or rule-breaking or failure to follow directions or some other failing on the part of the students. Unless the teacher is that egotistical moron, Lockhart (whose idea of a good time turns out to be a punishment to Harry), he or she designs the detention to be anything but enjoyable (e.g., scrubbing bedpans without using magic). Students are supposed to learn not to repeat the offense (if only to avoid detention). That detention doesn't serve that purpose is amply demonstrated by both the Twins and the Marauders, none of whom are deterred by numerous detentions from committing future offenses. (We do occasionally see, from Lupin and Dumbledore, the much more effective method of psychological manipulation--IOW, making the student feel guilty. But, in general, Hogwarts operates under a nineteenth-century philosophy of discipline that allows teachers to inflict humiliation and disgrace and discomfort and even fear on students as long as the students are in no real danger (and I agree that McG didn't know about the creature that was killing the unicorns or she would never have assigned four eleven-year-olds (Harry, Hermione, Neville, and Draco) to work with Hagrid in the Forbidden Forest. (Technically, Hermione was twelve, but it doesn't matter.)

Carol, who thinks that the detention in the forest is primarily a plot device in any case





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 20:06:56 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 20:06:56 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gust8c+312l@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guv3h0+b4l8@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186661

Pippin:
> <SNIP>
> Neville must have taken the list outside Gryffindor Tower, even though he didn't lose it there, or he would have known that it must have been stolen from inside. And for that, IMO, he deserved what he got. <SNIP>

Carol responds:

We know that Neville *didn't* take the list outside. Sirius Black informs HRH that Crookshanks stole the list off "a boy's" (Neville's) bedside table (PoA Am. ed. 364).

So poor Neville is being punished unfairly but doesn't speak up for himself. (He wouldn't be believed if he did, unfortunately.) He's done nothing wrong except to be forgetful. He had no idea that anyone other than a fellow Gryffindor could get into Gryffindor Tower to steal the passwords, much less that the thief would be Hermione's cat. Probably, he thinks that it must really be his fault and that he carelessly dropped it somewhere. But we know that he didn't.

Carol, now wondering how Crookshanks got into a closed room




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 20:56:01 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 20:56:01 -0000
Subject: Snape, Sadism, and Authorial Intent
In-Reply-To: <gut5hf+4mkk@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guv6d1+9r0s@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186662


> Zara:
> Whereas I had given my opinion of Snape as a teacher considerable thought, and arrived at an opinon, before I ever read that interview. If she in fact meant Snape was a sadist, I disagree with her. (As I have argued years ago, in contemporary, informal speech, the adjective "sadistic" may be used as a particularly colorful synonym for "mean", which I think is more likely what Rowling actually meant. Especially as she has since stated she likes him!)

Carol responds:
Good point. I'm not sure how much weight we should give JKR's casual, off-the-cuff remarks even if we value authorial intent as one criterion for interpreting the text. But, as I said, if an author's stated intentions were the definitive interpretation, literary criticism/analysis wouldn't exist.

To risk going off-topic a bit, to say that the author's (less than objective) views of his/her own work and (stated) intentions are all we need to understand a literary work is to say that, without such statements, we can't interpret a work at all. How can a critic know, for example, that he's interpreting a Shakespeare play "correctly" if Shakespeare didn't leave us the definitive interpretation (what he "meant" or intended by that play)? Simple. There is no single "correct" or definitive interpretation. Each critic brings a different perspective to the work he interprets--it can be mythological, historical, political, or psychological. It can focus on plot or character or setting or theme or motifs or technique or the influence or other authors. "Veil after veil may be undrawn" and still we won't see the full meaning because so many interpretations, many of them undreamed of by the author but still valid because they can be supported by the text are possible.

Basing our interpretation on a casual remark by the author is like basing our interpretation of the U.S. Constitution on a casual remark by one of the Founding Fathers who drafted it. Jefferson said such and such in a letter; therefore, we have to believe that, say, the right to keep and bear arms means only what he said and nothing else. But it doesn't work that way. Even the casual remark must be interpreted.

To return to JKR and Snape. As Zara points out, "sadistic" used casually can simply mean that he's what she elsewhere calls "a mean teacher." It need not mean that he, like Bellatrix, enjoys inflicting pain. (We have textual evidence that Bellatrix is a sadist. We have no such evidence for Snape.)

Zara:
> I can give an example of an interview comment by her that changed my reading of the text. When she stated that she had always thought of Albus as gay, it was like a lightbulb going off over my head, for me. A few different things that had not been explained to my satisfaction suddenly made all kinds of sense. (Why he fell so hard for Gellert, for example, it had not fully made sense to me before. The notion of *sharing* something like the Hallows had seemed patently ridiculous. But not, perhaps, for lovers/spouses). But I do not find that she has likewise left important pieces out of her writing of Snape, that I would need to consult with her to make sense of what she has written.
> 
> (Nor am I saying she failed with Albus. If I had made the leap myself, it would have all made sense without her explanation. That I did not, may well have more to do with limitations in my own personal experiences and background).

Carol responds:
For me there was no such lightbulb moment and DD's youthful friendship with GG made perfect sense without its being a love affair. In fact, it very closely matches known friendships between boys and young men at Eton and Oxford in the early nineteenth century, in particular Percy Shelley and his friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg (both of whom were heterosexual and both of whom were obsessed with philosophy and politics and what might be called the greater good).

So even though JKR "always thought of" Dumbledore as gay, I didn't see that in the text or need it for the DD/GG relationship to make sense to me. Her intention, IOW, certainly existed in her mind but for whatever reason did not clearly make it into the text. Even Rita Skeeter's insinuations are only insinuations. I, for one, don't believe that Grindelwald literally or figuratively conjured a white flag out of his wand. What evidence we have (and it's admittedly scanty) suggests that they really dueled.

Zara wrote:
> No. I am not discussing, note, what Rowling was thinking when she wrote something or other. I am discussing, on the basis of what she wrote, what it makes sense for me, or anyone else reading her books, to conclude about them. When she says her story was built around Snape and Dumbledore, I believe her. When she says she had the reason Voldemort would have spared Lily worked out in advance, I believe her. When she asserts that Snape is a sadist, I don't agree. If she said "I wrote Snape as a sadistic character" I would of course believe her, but would suggest she may have failed in this particular, small aspect of her project. <snip>

Carol responds:
Exactly. "Intended" and "succeeded in conveying" are two different things. All we can do is examine the text and see what's really there (as opposed to what JKR "intended" to convey) and interpret it in a way that's consistent with the evidence and that makes sense to us. (If she really "intended" Harry's Crucio of Amycus Carrow as "gallant," I'd say that she failed in that, too.)

Of course, JKR created her own characters. Of course, we wouldn't be discussing them if she hadn't done so. They are her creations. But once a book is out of its author's hands, the author can no longer control its interpretation. She (or he) can only express her (or his) intentions and hope that they came through to the majority of readers. (The same is true of real people in the hands of historians. The meaning and significance of their actions will be debated in terms that never occurred to the historical persons when they were alive. Such discussions don't make history inaccurate or invalid, but they do make it, like literary criticism, a matter of interpretation. The same is probably true of judges who interpret the law.)

Carol, who thinks that the insights of other readers are often much more valuable and revealing than those of the author, which are all too often subjective and distorted





From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 21:55:45 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 21:55:45 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gut6f5+go7h@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guv9t1+d8th@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186663

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Zara" <zgirnius at ...> wrote:
>
> > jkoney
> > It matters because she is the one who created him and has his story in her head/notes. She wrote him with specific thoughts and a certain point of view. At the worst the author can be unable to make you see that point. For me it's Harry naming his son after Snape. That I don't understand, but since she tells me it's true then I will go along with it.
> 
> Zara:
> That Harry Potter gave the middle name Severus to his son, and did so specifically to name him after Snape, is not an opinion of Rowling's hidden away in her notes or revealed to us in some obscure interview. It is a factual occurence within the series that we are shown in the Epilogue of Deathly Hallows. Either that, or we must suppose Harry deliberately lied to his son and there is some other, obscure to me reason that Al Sev is so named that we will never learn.
> 


jkoney replies:
Thank you for making my point. You interpreted what I wrote differently that what I had intended. I was trying to make the point that I didn't see in the story (The Prince's tale) that there was enough there to make me believe that Harry would name his son after Snape. 

I wasn't arguing that he didn't name his son after him like you listed in your response. Just that I didn't see anything that would make me want to name a child after him. I understand the part of him being brave and being on Dumbledore's side.


> > jkoney:
> > You may be able to interpret the characters as you see fit, but that doesn't mean you are interpreting the way they were intended to be interpreted.
> 
> Zara:
> Nor did I state I was. Nor is it important to me that I do so.


jkoney replies:
That I don't understand. You don't feel the need to understand the story as it was meant to be told?


> 
> > jkoney:
> > Some people liked Draco in the early books. There was nothing good about him at all in those scenes. He was arrogant, petty, insulting, etc. He would then hide behind Crabbe, Goyle, Snape or his father. How does one see him as a good character at that point?
> 
> Zara:
> How else does one see him, as an evil eleven year old boy? We might reasonably fear he will be walking down a path that might one day lead him into evil; that is another matter. We might also suspect something would divert him from such a path. Both would be equally speculative suppositions (and the latter would be more correct, IMNSVHO). 
> 
> But I would disagree we saw nothing to like about him. His initial approach to Harry, an unknown boy at Madam Malkin's, revealed him to have been raised in some objectionable views by his family, but was otherwise a reasonable depiction of a boy trying to impress another in an attempt to make a friend.

jkoney:
You see nothing to dislike about a character with "some objectionable views," someone who we see insult the Weasley's on the train as the wrong type of people, somone who is constantly coming up to the trio and insulting them or trying to get a rise out of them, someone who attempts to steal Neville's rememberball (sp?), who buys his way on to the quidditch team, who fakes his injury to be much more than it was.... Sorry but I don't see much at all to like about him.


> 
> > jkoney:
> > Again I see it as a either a failure of the author or a failure of the reader. 
> 
> Zara:
> It seems to be a widely held view, that Severus Snape is perhaps Rowling's finest literary creation to date. Yet there are almost as many opinions about this character as there are readers. *This*, you would call a failure by Rowling? I would call it a triumph. <bg>
>
jkoney replies:
I never said Snape wasn't an interesting literary creation. I'm arguing against the view that people misintrepet the character into being some sort of saint.




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 22:19:22 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 22:19:22 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Whose_interpretation__has_more_weight=3F_WAS_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism_?=
In-Reply-To: <guv9t1+d8th@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guvb9a+h6h3@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186664

> jkoney replies:
<SNIP of the rest of the post>
> I never said Snape wasn't an interesting literary creation. I'm arguing against the view that people misinterpet the character into being some sort of saint.

Alla:

My disagreement is that I do not believe that there is a**mis**interpretation of any book possible. As people already argued if you see something in the text, how can you be wrong in your interpretation? Works of art are not math puzzles where often there is only one correct answer.

If you mean that somebody interpets against author's intent, such interpetation is still valid if it is supported by the text in my view.

For example I believe (and even that is an opinion) that I interpret Snape in line with author's intent (and with that people will disagree of course).

However I am pretty sure that I interpret Dumbledore against author's intent, for the most part anyway.

JKR seem to love Dumbledore, think of him as flawed but really good man, epithome of goodness you see.

On my best days I am telling myself that Dumbledore has some good qualities, maybe.

But how exactly is my interpretation less valid than the one that JKR sees in her mind if I interpet based on what I see in the text.

I did not dream it up Dumbledore leaving defenseless infant to suffer with Dursleys and never checking up on him, not ONCE.

I did not dream up Dumbledore not even trying to fight for Sirius and testify against him at the hearing.

I did not dream up Dumbledore letting Draco run loose in the school in HBP despite students being hurt.

It is all there in the text. You will tell me but he was doing it all for the greater good, I mean, who cares  for example if Harry was neglected and abused, as long as that mysterious protection was supposed to protect his life.

And I will tell you that all that it does to me is establishes different motivations, in short we are interpreting same canon differently, that's all.

So, believe me I KNOW what Dumbledore JKR was trying to portray, I just see a very tiny signs of that man in the text.

And no, my interpretation is not the little less valid than hers "epithome of goodness" one.

JMO,

Alla





From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 22:19:32 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 22:19:32 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guuklr+6ua5@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guvb9k+nj7q@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186665

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "a_svirn" <a_svirn at ...> wrote:
>
> > Shaun:
> > 
> > Fair enough - but I do find Parvarti's behaviour objectionable. Hogwarts has 
> > a school uniform. She's violating the rules concerning uniform, and so it's 
> > entirely appropriate for a teacher to reprimand her for doing it. Now I come 
> > from a cultural background where school uniforms are normal, I wore one from 
> > the age of five to seventeen, and every school I've taught in has had a 
> > uniform. I'm generally speaking in favour of uniforms - but only if they are 
> > properly enforced. If they are not going to be enforced (and that means 
> > students facing some sort of sanction if they break the rules) they become 
> > pretty useless. If they are enforced, they are useful in many cases.
> > 
> > The fact is Professor McGonagall is responsible for ensuring the students in 
> > her class follow the uniform rules. Parvarti was not. That's not appropriate 
> > behaviour and it's entirely appropriate for a teacher to address it.
> 
> a_svirn:
> But Parvati was wearing uniform, presumably. Otherwise McGonagall would have commented on that too. Parvati hadn't violated any rule or code by securing her hair with a clasp. Just because Hermione couldn't bother with taming her hair, doesn't mean that other girls in Hogwarts didn't wear bands, hairpins or clasps. Or boys for that matter ? we know that Jordan, for instance, sported dreadlocks at some point. McGonagall is not reprimanding her for infringing the rules here, she's disparaging her taste. Petty thing to do, in my humble opinion. 

jkoney:
I interpreted it to mean that Parvati wasn't wearing an approved sort of hair clasp. If there is a uniform it probably (at least the ones I was subjected to) limits what you can wear as part of the uniform. While they have to wear hats, a Harley baseball cap wouldn't meet the requirements. Since she used the term ridiculous, I assumed it meant something garish to cause people (the visiting students) to look at her. If so, this would violate the dress code.


snip
> 
> a_svirn:
> Actually he didn't lose it: it was stolen from him. Poirot McGonagall is not. But never mind that. So you wouldn't forgive him for losing the list? Even if you knew full well that his memory disability was the reason of his losing it? And that *your own arrangement* put him into an untenable position? 
> 
jkoney:
There was a list, it was Neville's, he didn't deny it or say that it was stolen, what else should McGonagall have done? 

I don't believe his memory was so bad he couldn't remember things, otherwise he wouldn't have survived this long at school. Memorizing a password shouldn't be that difficult. I don't remember a scene of Neville asking for help.

If he did write it down, than that piece of paper should never leave his body. It should always be in one of his pockets so it can't be lost or stolen. The reasons of having a mad man loose are self explanatory.

I also don't remember Neville forgetting the passwords again.








From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 23:15:08 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 23:15:08 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guvb9k+nj7q@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guvehs+f88k@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186666

> jkoney:
> I interpreted it to mean that Parvati wasn't wearing an approved sort of hair clasp. 

a_svirn:
Approved sort of hair clasp?! What is it, North Korea? I don't believe even Umbridge could be bothered to regulate hair clasps. 

> jkoney:
If there is a uniform it probably (at least the ones I was subjected to) limits what you can wear as part of the uniform. While they have to wear hats, a Harley baseball cap wouldn't meet the requirements. Since she used the term ridiculous, I assumed it meant something garish to cause people (the visiting students) to look at her. If so, this would violate the dress code.

a_svirn:
Yes, I rather think "causing people to look at her" was the point. What's wrong with visiting students looking at her, though? Wasn't the whole idea of the Tournament to "establish ties between young witches and wizards of different nationalities"? Fortunately, they looked anyway ? we are told several times that Parvati is very pretty. 




From drednort at alphalink.com.au  Tue May 19 23:46:51 2009
From: drednort at alphalink.com.au (Shaun Hately)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 09:46:51 +1000
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guudq9+2d26@eGroups.com>
References: <guudq9+2d26@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <6AA1F577BF7846B19B18F1A9D084CF84@ShaunPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186667

> Alla:
>
> Where do you see in canon that they still had to wear uniforms for the 
> Ball?

Shaun:

I don't - I think it's pretty clear from canon, that they didn't have to 
wear uniform at the ball.

But McGonagall doesn't reprimand Parvarti for having the ornamental 
butterfly in her hair at the ball. That incident takes place when the 
students from Beauxbaton and Dumstrang are first arriving at Hogwarts and 
the school turns out to greet them.

To me, it's pretty clear that on that occasion, the teachers are being more 
strict than normal about the students appearances. The students are wearing 
their hats and cloaks - not just their robes which seems to be the only part 
of the uniform they are expected to wear as normal school clothing.

I went to a school with pretty strict uniform rules, but there were 
different requirement at different times - the most notable one for us, 
being we didn't have to wear our blazers during the course of the normal 
school day. But we did have to put them on for assembly's or in any 
situation where we were representing the school to others - and formally 
greeting another school would be one of those situations. At those times, 
the requirements to adhere to the school's rule on uniforms went right up. 
It seems the same happens at Hogwarts (at least in the books).

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia 




From drednort at alphalink.com.au  Wed May 20 00:21:44 2009
From: drednort at alphalink.com.au (Shaun Hately)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 10:21:44 +1000
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guuklr+6ua5@eGroups.com>
References: <guuklr+6ua5@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <042C4E83F427493EAAB5154F7FCFFD66@ShaunPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186668

a_svirn:

> But Parvati was wearing uniform, presumably. Otherwise McGonagall
> would have commented on that too. Parvati hadn't violated any rule or
> code by securing her hair with a clasp. Just because Hermione couldn't
> bother with taming her hair, doesn't mean that other girls in Hogwarts
> didn't wear bands, hairpins or clasps. Or boys for that matter - we
> know that Jordan, for instance, sported dreadlocks at some point.
> McGonagall is not reprimanding her for infringing the rules here, she's
> disparaging her taste. Petty thing to do, in my humble opinion.

School uniform isn't just about being required to wear certain things. Quite 
often school uniform rules also set restrictions on ornamentation.

And that often includes what girls put in their hair.

Just a couple of examples from Australian schools which have put their 
uniform requirements on the web (I'm sure I could find similar citations for 
British schools, but I have the Australian ones easily to hand).

St Hilda's, Western Australia:

"Hair must not be dyed beyond natural colourings. Hair should be neat and 
tied back once it reaches the collar of the uniform. Hair ribbons, head 
bands and scrunchies must be regulation blue. Only brown/blue hair ties, 
alice bands, or clips are to be worn"

Hurlstone Agricultural High School, New South Wales:

"Ribbons, hair ties, clips must be in school colours of red, yellow, blue or 
white."

I could provide a lot more examples. Schools with uniforms often do set 
rules on these things.

a_svirn:
> Actually he didn't lose it: it was stolen from him. Poirot McGonagall is 
> not.
> But never mind that. So you wouldn't forgive him for losing the list? Even 
> if you
> knew full well that his memory disability was the reason of his losing it? 
> And that
> *your own arrangement* put him into an untenable position?

Shaun:

Actually, I would forgive Neville for losing the list - provided immediately 
he realised he'd lost it, he'd reported its loss. Anyone can make a 
mistake - but if you make a mistake, you need to take steps to correct it. 
Neville's "misbehaviour" in this case involved three separate incidents - he 
wrote the passwords down, he lost them (yes, they were stolen, but I think 
the fact that he apparently left Gryffindor tower without realising they'd 
gone missing indicates he wasn't taking care of them - also, at the time she 
punished him, Professor McGonagall did not know they'd been stolen - she 
assumed, as Neville did, that he had lost them. I do think it would be 
entirely reasonable to expect Professor McGonagall to apologise to Neville, 
if she ever became aware that the passwords had been stolen rather than 
lost - but at the time she punishes him, she has a honest and reasonable 
belief that he lost the passwords. Teachers aren't omniscient.), and then he 
failed to report that loss despite having two days to do so.

If he'd gone to Professor McGonagall - or to Percy for that matter (Head Boy 
and in Gryffindor House) or to any other person in authority and said: "I've 
lost the passwords, the tower's security could be compromised," yes, I'd 
readily forgive him. But he didn't do that.

> Shaun:
>
> > First of all, Neville does achieves adequate results in Professor
> > McGonagall's class - he does get an Acceptable OWL. It's not his best
> > subject but he does do well enough to pass.
>
a_svirn:
> But not enough to be admitted to her NEWT class, even though her 
> requirements are considerably less stringent than Snape's.

Shaun:

I'm assuming that the names of the grades applied at Hogwarts mean what what 
they say. An 'A' grade is called 'Acceptable' so I'm assuming it is 
acceptable. An 'E' is called 'Exceeds Expectation' so I'm assuming a student 
who gets an E does better than normal.

Some teachers assign higher requirements for NEWTS - Nastily Exhausting 
Wizarding Tests - note that name as well. NEWTS are meant to be very 
difficult. They're not meant to be accessible to every single student.

We only have limited knowledge of Neville's marks at OWL. We know he got an 
O in Herbology, an E in DADA and Charms and an A in Transfiguration. I think 
we can very safely assume that Neville got some form of failing grade in 
Potions.

What did he get in Care of Magical Creatures? What did he get in History of 
Magic? What did he get in Astronomy? What did he get in Divination? I think 
the text strongly suggests he got a bunch of As at most - McGonagall 
suggests Charms to him - and no other subject - because he got an E.

A seems to me Neville's 'normal' grade. There's a couple of areas he does 
better than normal in, and one he most definitely does worse in. Blaming a 
teacher for the fact that Neville got his typical mark in their subject 
seems odd to me,

a_svirn:
> Yes, but does the male in question need to be a student with disabilities?
> Which is more to the point in this particular case.

Shaun:

He doesn't need to be a student with disabilities, but the fact that he is 
does not preclude this approach. Again, the pages I cited from Leonard Sax's 
work address this in detail, but he does specifically discuss this in terms 
of its positive effects on boys with LDs.

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia 




From drednort at alphalink.com.au  Wed May 20 00:26:58 2009
From: drednort at alphalink.com.au (Shaun Hately)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 10:26:58 +1000
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guulk4+och8@eGroups.com>
References: <guulk4+och8@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <67D5E1AB5C7B43D184CC227088C58DF5@ShaunPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186669

a_svirn
> Yeah, and Lavender was offended that Ron would wear the
> "sweetheart" necklace in public. Obviously ridiculous ornaments
> weren't banned in Hogwarts.

Shaun:

Different school uniform requirements often apply at different times in 
schools. Some occasions require more formal adherence to the rules than 
others.

At the time Parvarti is reprimanded, Hogwarts is expecting its students to 
make an unusually good impression on a group of guests arriving at the 
school. They are expected to be wearing their hats and their cloaks, rather 
than just the robes that seem to be the generally expected uniform most of 
the time - again, just drawing on my own experiences, this is entirely in 
keeping with the expectations that applied during my own schooling, when we 
were allowed to go most of the day without our blazers, but were expected to 
put them on for assemblies and when representing the school (nerds like me 
just wore the thing constantly, except when the weather made it too hot to 
do so). Perhaps McGonagall wouldn't have said anything about Parvarti's hair 
clip on a normal day. This wasn't a normal day. It was a formal assembly.

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia 




From drednort at alphalink.com.au  Wed May 20 00:47:32 2009
From: drednort at alphalink.com.au (Shaun Hately)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 10:47:32 +1000
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <guvehs+f88k@eGroups.com>
References: <guvehs+f88k@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <19D1D890AA1541B58BE7AEFDD3B3A0C1@ShaunPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186670

a_svirn:
> Approved sort of hair clasp?! What is it, North Korea? I don't believe
> even Umbridge could be bothered to regulate hair clasps.

Shaun:

I've just pointed out in another message that there are schools in Australia 
which do precisely that.

The following is the note that appeared in my school diary back in 1992 
under the list of uniform requirements:

"At no time should the jumper be worn as the outer garment. The College 
blazer is optional with the summer uniform, except for Assembly in the Great 
Hall when it must be worn and on any other occasion when boys are directed 
to do so. Summer socks must be pulled up to the knees at all times.

Each boy is to be clean-shaven, and his hair is to be well groomed and not 
long enough to touch his collar. Badges may be worn on the College blazer 
provided they are directly related to the College. No earrings may be worn. 
Boys may wear a plain watch with a plain band. No other visible 
ornamentation may be worn. No deviation from the College uniform is 
permitted without the express written permission of the Headmaster. A boy 
who is for any reason not wearing the proper uniform must present himself 
before 8.25am to his Form Master with a note explaining the circumstances."

And they definitely enforced that. When I was a Prefect, it was part of my 
job to enforce it (and in all honesty, I was probably as officious as Percy 
Weasley in the role).

I was at an all boys school, so they didn't need to address issues such as 
hair ties. But some girls schools *definitely* did so - and still do in many 
cases.

It's absolutely reasonable to assume that Hogwarts does the same. School 
uniform suppliers actually specificaly sell hair ties, etc, designed to 
conform to the standards that many schools impose.

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia 




From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Wed May 20 00:48:39 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 00:48:39 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <67D5E1AB5C7B43D184CC227088C58DF5@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <guvk17+993h@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186671

> a_svirn
> > Yeah, and Lavender was offended that Ron would wear the
> > "sweetheart" necklace in public. Obviously ridiculous ornaments
> > weren't banned in Hogwarts.
> 
> Shaun:

> At the time Parvarti is reprimanded, Hogwarts is expecting its students to 
> make an unusually good impression on a group of guests arriving at the 
> school. They are expected to be wearing their hats and their cloaks, rather 
> than just the robes that seem to be the generally expected uniform most of 
> the time - again, just drawing on my own experiences, this is entirely in 
> keeping with the expectations that applied during my own schooling, when we 
> were allowed to go most of the day without our blazers, but were expected to 
> put them on for assemblies and when representing the school (nerds like me 
> just wore the thing constantly, except when the weather made it too hot to 
> do so). Perhaps McGonagall wouldn't have said anything about Parvarti's hair 
> clip on a normal day. This wasn't a normal day. It was a formal assembly.

Magpie:
Uniforms at Hogwarts are contradictory because JKR often forgets everybody's supposed to wear robes, period. Iirc, in GoF hats simply make a rare appearance. There's a scene where somebody knocks Parvati's hat off somewhere and I think it's in class, implying that they wear hats all the time. 

I still think the reading more supported by the text and McGonagall's character is not that she's a big stickler for no ornamentation and standard hairstyles in Hogwarts but that she's uptight about making the impression she wants and snaps at Parvati and Ron. We've got evidence throughout the books that they don't have overly strict rules about hair and ornamentation. Hermione doesn't have to pull back her hair, dreadlocks and braids are fine, Luna can wear radishes and bottlecap necklaces. Parvati's wearing a gaudy barrette and Ron's uniform is fine, she just doesn't like that his hat is crooked. I believe we later see McGonagall being competitive with the other school personally. Parvati's barrette doesn't follow the image she wants to project, imo. That's totally consistent with her character.

McGonagall doesn't say she's enforcing any rule at all about uniforms. She just tells Parvati to take that "ridiculous" thing out of her hair. If the problem is the regulation uniform, I think she'd say that, not show anger at the ridiculousness of Parvati's taste in hair clips. But that's what she wants to express at that moment.

-m




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Wed May 20 03:05:49 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 03:05:49 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 18 - 19
Message-ID: <guvs2d+fooj@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186672

When I read Chapter 18 before I did not think that Harry had much right to be angry at Dumbledore for not sharing his past with him. I mean, do not get me wrong, I always thought that Harry has a million and million more reasons to be angry at Dumbledore if nothing else then for not sharing the past that actually concerns HARRY, like the identity of the eavesdropper, like the tiny thing about the Prophecy, etc. And there are also other events that Dumbledore involved Harry without asking him, so I think Harry has plenty righteous reasons to be angry, just not about Dumbledore sharing HIS PAST with him.

I totally thought and think that Dumbledore's past with Grindelwald was not Harry's business.

But when I read this quote, I do not think Harry IS really angry about not sharing Dumbledore's past, I think he is projecting the reasons he has every right to be angry about and he is expressing them here IMO:

"Maybe I am!" Harry bellowed, and he flong his arms over his head, hardly knowing whether he was trying to hold in his anger or protect himself from the reasons of his own dissillusionment. "Look what he asked of me Hermione! Risk your life, Harry! And again! And again! And don't expect me to explain everything, just trust me blindly, trust that I know what I'm doing, trust me even though I don't trust you! Never the whole truth! Never!" - p.295


Ok, I confess, I think that the writing in the Silver Doe is freaking BEATIFUL.

"And then the source of the light stepped out from behind an oak. It was a silver-white doe, moon-bright and dazzling, picking her way over the ground, still silent, and leaving no hoof prints in the fine powdering of snow. She stepped towards him, her beatiful head  with its wide, long-lashed eyes held high.
Harry stared at the creature, filled with wonder, not at her strangeness, but at her inexplicable familiarity. He felt that he had been waiting for her to come, but he had forgotten, untill this moment that they had arranged to meet" - p.298

Alla:

You think Harry's subconscious may have remembered Lily's patronus? I mean, he did have flashbacks of the Sirius' bike after all?

I am not sure if child that young can keep his memories, I know that my first memories that I still have start since I was around three, but it is magic anyway, so why not. :)


And welcome back Ron you idiot. "The silver doe was nothing, nothinhg compared with Ron's reappearance, he could not believe it"


"As certainly as he had known that the doe was benign, he knew that Ron had to be the one to wield the sword. Dumbledore had at least taught Harry something about certain kinds of magic, of the incalculable power of certain acts." - p.304

Alla:

What acts that would be? I mean, is narrator talking about the acts of same magnitude as Lily's sacrifice? Or something on the smaller scale?







From happyjoeysmiley at yahoo.com  Wed May 20 03:29:02 2009
From: happyjoeysmiley at yahoo.com (happyjoeysmiley)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 03:29:02 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 18 - 19
In-Reply-To: <guvs2d+fooj@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guvtdu+58sa@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186673

> "As certainly as he had known that the doe was benign, he knew that Ron had to be the one to wield the sword. Dumbledore had at least taught Harry something about certain kinds of magic, of the incalculable power of certain acts." - p.304
> 
> Alla:
> 
> What acts that would be? I mean, is narrator talking about the acts of same magnitude as Lily's sacrifice? Or something on the smaller scale?

Joey:

Both types of acts (small & big) I think. These were what I thought of when I read the passage (apart from Lily's sacrifice and Voldemort's downfall):

1. DD's explanation of why LV could not possess Harry at MoM in OoTP climax

2. DD had told Harry about Pettigrew being in Harry's debt because Harry saved Pettigrew's life and that there would come a time when Harry will not regret having saved his life.

3. DD had told how Harry got the Gryffindor's sword in the CoS at a time when Harry was feeling uneasy about the Sorting Hat's view that Harry has it in him to do well in Slytherin - that one's choices are what that actually matter. {This may not be a "big scale act" but yet it is significant}

4. DD's explanation of why Quirrell could not touch Harry




From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Wed May 20 03:28:55 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 03:28:55 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 18 - 19
In-Reply-To: <guvs2d+fooj@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <guvtdn+k3p0@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186674

> Alla:
> What acts that would be? I mean, is narrator talking about the acts of same magnitude as Lily's sacrifice? Or something on the smaller scale?

Zara:
I presume that in this quote Harry refers to the twins acts of Ron saving his life, and taking possession of the Sword of Gryffindor. Both the importance of saving a life, and the significance of the Sword, are facts Harry has discussed with Albus in the past.





From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Wed May 20 12:59:08 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 12:59:08 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <042C4E83F427493EAAB5154F7FCFFD66@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gv0uqs+vsub@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186675

> a_svirn:
> 
> > But Parvati was wearing uniform, presumably. Otherwise McGonagall
> > would have commented on that too. Parvati hadn't violated any rule or
> > code by securing her hair with a clasp. Just because Hermione couldn't
> > bother with taming her hair, doesn't mean that other girls in Hogwarts
> > didn't wear bands, hairpins or clasps. Or boys for that matter - we
> > know that Jordan, for instance, sported dreadlocks at some point.
> > McGonagall is not reprimanding her for infringing the rules here, she's
> > disparaging her taste. Petty thing to do, in my humble opinion.

> Shaun:
> School uniform isn't just about being required to wear certain things. Quite 
> often school uniform rules also set restrictions on ornamentation.
> 
> And that often includes what girls put in their hair.
> 
> Just a couple of examples from Australian schools which have put their 
> uniform requirements on the web (I'm sure I could find similar citations for 
> British schools, but I have the Australian ones easily to hand).
> 
> St Hilda's, Western Australia:
> 
> "Hair must not be dyed beyond natural colourings. Hair should be neat and 
> tied back once it reaches the collar of the uniform. Hair ribbons, head 
> bands and scrunchies must be regulation blue. Only brown/blue hair ties, 
> alice bands, or clips are to be worn"


a_svirn:
And Gryffindor colours are red and gold.  I can totally see Parvati wearing an ornamental butterfly in her House colours, which would be considered too gaudy by St. Hilda's standards. Not that we have any reason to believe that Hogwats regulations are anywhere near as strict as St: Hilda's: otherwise Luna would have spent her entire time in Hogwarts in detention. McGonagall in this scene reprimands Parvati for her taste, which is a personal attack and therefore inappropriate. 

> 
> a_svirn:
> > Actually he didn't lose it: it was stolen from him. Poirot McGonagall is 
> > not.
> > But never mind that. So you wouldn't forgive him for losing the list? Even 
> > if you
> > knew full well that his memory disability was the reason of his losing it? 
> > And that
> > *your own arrangement* put him into an untenable position?
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Actually, I would forgive Neville for losing the list - provided immediately 
> he realised he'd lost it, he'd reported its loss. Anyone can make a 
> mistake - but if you make a mistake, you need to take steps to correct it. 
> Neville's "misbehaviour" in this case involved three separate incidents - he 
> wrote the passwords down, he lost them (yes, they were stolen, but I think 
> the fact that he apparently left Gryffindor tower without realising they'd 
> gone missing indicates he wasn't taking care of them - also, at the time she 
> punished him, Professor McGonagall did not know they'd been stolen - she 
> assumed, as Neville did, that he had lost them. I do think it would be 
> entirely reasonable to expect Professor McGonagall to apologise to Neville, 
> if she ever became aware that the passwords had been stolen rather than 
> lost - but at the time she punishes him, she has a honest and reasonable 
> belief that he lost the passwords. Teachers aren't omniscient.), and then he 
> failed to report that loss despite having two days to do so.


a_svirn:
Yes, that would be bad form indeed. But we don't know if Neville noticed that his list had gone missing, and McGonagall did not bother to find out. As for not taking the proper care of it, I'd say that leaving it in the dormitory was actually pretty sensible. He had no reason to suspect his house-mates, did he? And knowing his propensity for loosing things he didn't trust himself enough to carry it on his person.

You didn't address in your response the other side of the issue, though. How about the fact that McGonagall's own arrangements put Neville in the loose-loose situation, and when he predictably enough lost, he was the only one who was punished? Didn't McGonagall as a responsible adult bear a greater responsibility for what had occurred? 

> Shaun:
> 
> I'm assuming that the names of the grades applied at Hogwarts mean what what 
> they say. An 'A' grade is called 'Acceptable' so I'm assuming it is 
> acceptable. An 'E' is called 'Exceeds Expectation' so I'm assuming a student 
> who gets an E does better than normal.

<snip> 

.
> 
> What did he get in Care of Magical Creatures? What did he get in History of 
> Magic? What did he get in Astronomy? What did he get in Divination? I think 
> the text strongly suggests he got a bunch of As at most - McGonagall 
> suggests Charms to him - and no other subject - because he got an E.
> 
a_svirn:
We know enough to conclude that he performed better in the classless where he wasn't constantly reprimanded. We haven't seen a single Astronomy lesson, but as for Divination, Trelawney definitely bullied him, and very elaborately so. 
 
> a_svirn:
> > Yes, but does the male in question need to be a student with disabilities?
> > Which is more to the point in this particular case.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> He doesn't need to be a student with disabilities, but the fact that he is 
> does not preclude this approach. Again, the pages I cited from Leonard Sax's 
> work address this in detail, but he does specifically discuss this in terms 
> of its positive effects on boys with LDs.

a_svirn:
Well, I guess I disagree with Sax on this one. An admittedly superficial research on internet revealed that his point of view is not all that widely accepted and is in fact often described as "controversial". Moreover, McGonagall behaviour can arguably be qualified as "disability discrimination". 





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Wed May 20 14:10:46 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 14:10:46 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv0uqs+vsub@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv1316+e3u2@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186676


> 
> 
> a_svirn:
> And Gryffindor colours are red and gold.  I can totally see Parvati wearing an ornamental butterfly in her House colours, which would be considered too gaudy by St. Hilda's standards. Not that we have any reason to believe that Hogwats regulations are anywhere near as strict as St: Hilda's: otherwise Luna would have spent her entire time in Hogwarts in detention. McGonagall in this scene reprimands Parvati for her taste, which is a personal attack and therefore inappropriate. 

Pippin:
Luna is a Ravenclaw and her appearance is therefore Flitwick's responsibility. If he chooses to be lax that does not mean that McGonagall has to be lax also. I agree that McGonagall's irritation shows she is tense about the situation, and she may normally be inclined to let minor lapses pass. But she is acting 'in loco parentis' and you'd better believe that parents have the right to educate  their childrens' taste and to demand a certain standard of appearance on formal occasions. 

>
> a_svirn:
> Yes, that would be bad form indeed. But we don't know if Neville noticed that his list had gone missing, and McGonagall did not bother to find out.

Pippin:
We don't know whether Neville made the list  so he could study it and impress the password on his memory before leaving the tower, or so that he wouldn't have to memorize the passwords at all. In either case he was responsible for knowing where it was at all times and for reporting the fact if it went missing. 

Obviously Neville didn't notice when he'd lost track of the list, or he would have known that it was stolen from his bedside table. That would have shown that Sirius had an accomplice inside the tower, since Sirius himself couldn't use the list to break into the tower until he had obtained it. If Neville had reported it,   it would have alerted the staff to be prepared -- at the very least the passwords would have been changed. 

I don't understand the insistence that Neville had no other means of coping with the situation. If it was too embarrassing to ask for help outright, he could have traded for it. Surely somebody in Gryffindor Tower must struggle with herbology? 

Anyway, why so insistent that McGonagall should have recognized and known how to compensate for Neville's learning disabilities? The whole concept was unknown in the real world until relatively recently, and the wizards seem to be as far behind us in their theories of mental function as they are ahead of us in their ability to manipulate it.

*We* may know that stress makes memory problems worse, and therefore being aggressive with Neville is exactly the wrong thing to do. But there's no canon that anyone in the wizarding world knows that.  In the WW, the only known way to compensate for a learning problem is to try harder, and that's what Snape and McGonagall are trying to make Neville do. 

McGonagall may be doing it because she cares about her students, and Snape may be doing it because he cares about his exceptionally high pass rate, but in neither case, IMO, are they trying to make things worse, although unfortunately that's the result. 

Of course they'd be better teachers if they realized their method wasn't working for Neville and changed it, but Rowling couldn't resist making the professors a sort of rogue's gallery of teaching styles,  so none of them is as flexible as a good teacher should be. 

Pippin





From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Wed May 20 16:50:42 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 16:50:42 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv1316+e3u2@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv1cd2+ped6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186677

> Pippin:
> Luna is a Ravenclaw and her appearance is therefore Flitwick's responsibility. If he chooses to be lax that does not mean that McGonagall has to be lax also. I agree that McGonagall's irritation shows she is tense about the situation, and she may normally be inclined to let minor lapses pass. But she is acting 'in loco parentis' and you'd better believe that parents have the right to educate  their childrens' taste and to demand a certain standard of appearance on formal occasions. 

a_svirn:
I wasn't discussing teachers' rights (though I don't believe they are equal to those of parents); I was merely saying that McGonagall's behaviour in this scene is petty. Parents can be petty too. I'd say ridiculing a teenage daughter's taste in jewellery is not the best strategy to improve it.  

> Pippin:

> I don't understand the insistence that Neville had no other means of coping with the situation. If it was too embarrassing to ask for help outright, he could have traded for it. Surely somebody in Gryffindor Tower must struggle with herbology? 

a_svirn:
He could, but he chose the way that didn't involve any additional embarrassment. He had enough of that as it was. He had no reason to suppose that anyone in Gryffindor would steal the list, and he made sure that it stayed in the dormitory. All in all, he made best of a very bad situation. If his best was not good enough, it was McGonagall's fault, not his. Just because she refused to recognise that he had memory problems didn't mean that they would go away.

> Pippin:
> Anyway, why so insistent that McGonagall should have recognized and known how to compensate for Neville's learning disabilities? The whole concept was unknown in the real world until relatively recently, and the wizards seem to be as far behind us in their theories of mental function as they are ahead of us in their ability to manipulate it.

a_svirn:
It was Shaun, who came up with the diagnosis; I only said that Neville had shockingly bad memory. McGonagall was certainly aware of that: she alluded to his bad memory often enough in and out of the classroom. Despite this awareness she refused to recognise the need for adjustments and in this particular instance her neglect compromised her House's security. 




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 20 18:46:57 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 18:46:57 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 18 - 19
In-Reply-To: <guvtdn+k3p0@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv1j71+341k@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186678

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Zara" <zgirnius at ...> wrote:
>
> > Alla:
> > What acts that would be? I mean, is narrator talking about the acts of same magnitude as Lily's sacrifice? Or something on the smaller scale?
> 
> Zara:
> I presume that in this quote Harry refers to the twins acts of Ron saving his life, and taking possession of the Sword of Gryffindor. Both the importance of saving a life, and the significance of the Sword, are facts Harry has discussed with Albus in the past.
>
Carol responds:

DD has told Harry about "the incalculable power or certain acts," but he can't have meant Ron's leaping into the pool to save Harry, which hadn't happened yet. I think Harry is remembering, primarily, Lily's self-sacrifice and, secondarily, DD's words in relation to Harry's own act of mercy in sparing Wormtail, which, he predicts (correctly), will have important consequences in the future. Putting all this together with what he knows about the Sword (Scrimgeour has told him that it will present itself to a "worthy Gryffindor" and he knows how he, himself, earned it the first time), Harry deduces (IMO) that Ron's act in selflessly saving him (and retrieving the Sword) has made him, not Harry, the "worthy Gryffindor" who is (to use Harry's word) "supposed" to destroy the Horcrux. 

So, yes, Harry is thinking about "the importance of saving a life and the significance of the Sword," but he's also, IMO, equating Ron's actions with other "acts" he's aware of that have had powerful magical consequences. (His own action in entering the CoS to save Ginny may also be included even though he's not specifically aware of the conditions of "need and valor" that Portrait!DD described to Snape. He certainly understands that Ron's actions fit the criteria of "valor, nerve, and chivalry" that "set Gryffindors apart.") There's no question in his mind that it's "supposed" to be Ron who destroys the Horcrux, apparently because Ron has just performed one of those incalculably powerful acts that Dumbledore had in mind.

Ron's unthinking courage in just diving in and rescuing Harry is, of course, different from Lily's terrified begging of Voldemort to kill her and spare Harry (which would have had no magical effect at all had LV not already promised Snape to spare Lily though Harry doesn't yet know that--as DD has told Harry, she had a choice and could have lived but chose to die for Harry). Nevertheless, Ron's leaping fully clothed into the frozen pool is an act of remarkable courage that sets aside the possible consequences to himself (drowning in freezing water, held down by his water-logged clothes) to rescue a friend who would have died without him (or perhaps been vaporized like Vapor!mort because of the soul bit, but neither he nor Harry knows that).

Anyway, even though Ron's action isn't quite comparable to Lily's in the magnitude of his (potential) self-sacrifice--it's not going to provide Harry with any sort of love protection (impossible, anyway, because they don't share the same blood) and he didn't actually die as Lily did--it nevertheless qualifies (IMO) as an action with powerful magical consequences, in this case, the right to use the Sword of Gryffindor to destroy a Horcrux.

Of course, "the incalculable power of certain acts" is one of those phrases that we can interpret in any way that makes sense to us, but this explanation makes sense to me.

Carol, still wondering what would happen if an "unworthy Gryffindor" or a non-Gryffindor ("worthy" or "unworthy") tried to use the Sword




From randmath23 at yahoo.com  Tue May 19 12:36:49 2009
From: randmath23 at yahoo.com (randmath23)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 12:36:49 -0000
Subject: Neville's punishment
Message-ID: <guu951+9htt@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186679


Of all the characters in the Harry Potter books, Neville is the most logical person for JKR to use to embarass.  From the first book till definitely the last book, Neville is often portrayed as the shy, forgetful one.  What Neville had to overcome from his past with his parents being committed to St. Mungo's, I wonder how he can even function around other people.  I was wondering, who has the authority concerning the passwords to get into the common rooms?  With the rigors of school, I would have a hard time remembering the password.


randmath23



From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Wed May 20 19:19:09 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 19:19:09 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <5275B2ECD02041759B63CF7C62E236D0@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gv1l3d+h94l@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186680

Good to hear from you again Shaun, we missed you smiling face,
and your intelligent comments.

I'm going to make some broad comments on your post, but I don't
believe they will be specific enough to quote you directly.

First we need to get rid of this modern notion that everybody
should feel good all the time. This is especially true of kids.
You do kids a disservice if you convince them that life is like
a Disney cartoon, where very thing is bright and happy. THAT
does not prepare them for the real world. That is my opinion,
does far more harm that good in the long run.

Next, to the idea of treating everyone the same. I put 'every
one equal' as being one notch below 'zero tolerance'. To me
'zero tolerance' means zero brains, zero effort, zero 
responsibility. It is the worst policy ever, and is alway 
doomed to ultimate failure as one size fits all, means no
size fits anyone. The list of colossal failure (and lawsuits) resulting from Zero Tolerance is unfathomable. 

Treating everyone equal means people don't have to think,
they don't have to evaluate circumstance, they don't have to
take mitigating factors into consideration. This has absolutely
nothing to do with fair punishment, or the good of the students,
and every thing to do with making the jobs of people in 
authority easier, or at least, it creates the false impression 
that things will be easier.

Side Note: Yes, I'm babbling, but I am going to bring this
back on topic soon. 

So, now let's look at McGonagall, while she is certainly strict,
she seems completely fair. She will punish a Gryffindor just as
quickly and easily as she will punish a Slytherin. Though, she
does show a slight favoritism on rare occasion, usually 
involving Quiditch. But I don't see that as a problem.

I also don't see a problem with her punishment of Neville.

Shaun suspects Neville might have a learning disability, but
to me, he seems more like an ordinary kid who just happens to
be more susceptible to stress. 

Kids in general can't remember anything. They don't remember
not to slam the door, they don't remember to pick up their
shoes, they don't remember to keep the bikes out of the drive
way. That is just typical kid behavior and has far more to do
with a lack of interest, a lack of attention, and a lack of 
forethought. BUT, those are the very things a kid needs to
function in the real world. You don't do kids any favors by
not demanding that they DO pay attention, that they DO take
an interest in important things, and if they plan to live a
long time, that they DO develop Forethought. 

In my opinion, given them flowers and gold stars is not going
to help, you must demand it of them, and you must press that
demand until they comply. And that is exactly what Snape does
to Neville. He demands the Neville pay attention and think 
ahead. 

Certainly his methods make us feel sorry for Neville, who seems
something of a sad clown to start with. But is alleviating the
'sorry' we feel helping us, or is it helping Neville? I think
it has more to do with us than Neville.

Now to Snape; does Snape have a bias. Well, yes, clearly he 
does, but we must ask why? What underlies that bias?

First and foremost, Snape must have a bias toward Slytherin 
and against Gryffindor if he is to remain in good standing with
the dormant Death Eaters. There will come a time, when he is
required to re-enter their ranks, and he must do so in good
standing. So, he must show a bias toward Slytherin.

Does he show an extra bias against Harry and Harry's friends;
again, YES. But again, what underlies that action? Certainly,
toward Harry, there is a ton of guilt and shame. Rather than
face his own guild and shame, he seeks to find fault with 
Harry. In a sense, it is not my fault that I have all these 
feelings, it is Harry fault for being a third rate wizard.

How common is this among adults, and more so children? How
many of us strike out at others, when we ourselves are feeling
strong emotions. This is all I see Snape doing.

Now Snape is not nice, but 'not nice' is a far cry from
Sadistic. Snape is often mean and within a limited context,
cruel. But teachers are not suppose to be your friends, they are
not your buddy. There are there to demand and to make sure you
achieve at a certain level, and if that means being your 
enemy to make it happen, so be it.

So some extent that seems to be what Shaun is saying, the 
job at hand is far far more important than whether you like
me as a teacher or as a person. 

Notice that Snape's student get good results, well above what
we assume is average, in the qualifications tests. Every 
student hates him, but they learn potions and learn it well,
because that is precisely what Snape demands. 

Now, yes, I do feel sorry for and sympathy with the students
that Snape bullies. But shy overstressed Neville seems to 
turn himself around in the end. The boy whose brain was
downing in stress chemical to the point of making him 
disfunction, seem to have found a way to deal with very 
stressful situation in end.

So, do you suppose he did that by facing stress and overcoming
it, or do you suppose he did that by being made to feel good
all the time and avoiding stress?

Yes, Snape's methods were unkind, but in the end, they produced
a Neville who openly challenge the darkest most dangerous
wizard of all time. 

Yes, Snape was mean and cruel, but he was also, ultimately
effective. 

Steve/bboyminn






From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 20 19:21:17 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 19:21:17 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv1316+e3u2@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv1l7d+84eq@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186681

a_svirn:
> > And Gryffindor colours are red and gold.  I can totally see Parvati wearing an ornamental butterfly in her House colours, which would be considered too gaudy by St. Hilda's standards. Not that we have any reason to believe that Hogwats regulations are anywhere near as strict as St: Hilda's: otherwise Luna would have spent her entire time in Hogwarts in detention. McGonagall in this scene reprimands Parvati for her taste, which is a personal attack and therefore inappropriate. 
> 
> Pippin:
> Luna is a Ravenclaw and her appearance is therefore Flitwick's responsibility. If he chooses to be lax that does not mean that McGonagall has to be lax also. I agree that McGonagall's irritation shows she is tense about the situation, and she may normally be inclined to let minor lapses pass. But she is acting 'in loco parentis' and you'd better believe that parents have the right to educate  their childrens' taste and to demand a certain standard of appearance on formal occasions. 

Carol responds:

I don't understand all the fuss that's being made about McGonagall's behavior on this occasion. Sure, she's not concerned for Parvati's feelings and she's quite short with her, but how does that differ from her usual brusque sternness?

I agree with Pippin that McGonagall's concern for the Gryffindors' appearance occurs only on special occasions. She wants them to make a good impression. (She doesn't seem to care how the Ravenclaws or Hufflepuffs or Slytherins look; that's not her concern as HoH of Gryffindor--though she *is* deputy headmistress and perhaps ought to care about the appearance Hogwarts students in general rather than just her own House.

In SS/PS, before the first-years are Sorted, she tells them all to "smarten [them]selves up" before they enter the Great Hall. Harry sees her glancing at Neville's crooked cloak and the infamous smudge on Ron's nose, and he obediently but futilely tries to flatten his own hair even though she didn't specifically stare at him. We don't know whether she scowled at anyone else because we're seeing from Harry's PoV, but even here, her attention seems to be focused on future Gryffindors, as if she knows based on their parentage that a Weasley and a Longbottom are likely to end up in her House.

In the case of Parvati's butterfly, McGonagall is specifically concerned with the impression that the Gryffindors will make on the students and headmasters/mistresses of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang, so she's much more concerned than she would normally be with little matters that might draw their attention and cause them to snicker or raise an eyebrow. 

Personally, I'm much more disturbed by her words to Neville, which I quoted in another post, telling him in front of the other Gryffindors not to let anyone from Durmstrang know that he can't perform a simple switching spell. She has let her concern for appearances and for Gryffindor's reputation (maybe even her own reputation as Transfiguration teacher, though perhaps I'm being unfair) take precedence over Neville's feelings, embarrassing and humiliating him in front of the class because she doesn't want Gryffindors making fools of themselves in front of anyone from Durmstrang.

To return to the appearance of the students, I confess that I can't imagine either Flitwick or Sprout (whose own hat usually sprouts patches) making a fuss about their students' appearance, but I'll bet that Madame Maxime and Karkaroff do. (We later see him calling one student a "disgusting boy" for spilling food on his robes.) And I can imagine Snape criticizing, say, Pansy Parkinson for some infraction similar to Parvati's out of the hearing of the students from other Houses.

Carol, who would have considered point-docking or a detention for Parvati's butterfly unduly harsh but sees nothing out of the ordinary  or out of character for McGonagall in the less-than-tactful order to remove it




From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Wed May 20 19:49:04 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 19:49:04 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv1l3d+h94l@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv1mrg+oov8@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186682

"Steve" <bboyminn at ...> wrote:
>
> Good to hear from you again Shaun, we missed you smiling face,
> and your intelligent comments.
> 
> I'm going to make some broad comments on your post, but I don't
> believe they will be specific enough to quote you directly.
> 
> First we need to get rid of this modern notion that everybody
> should feel good all the time. This is especially true of kids.
> You do kids a disservice if you convince them that life is like
> a Disney cartoon, where very thing is bright and happy. THAT
> does not prepare them for the real world. That is my opinion,
> does far more harm that good in the long run.
> 
<SNIP>
Steve B continues:

> So, now let's look at McGonagall, while she is certainly strict,
> she seems completely fair. She will punish a Gryffindor just as
> quickly and easily as she will punish a Slytherin. Though, she
> does show a slight favoritism on rare occasion, usually 
> involving Quiditch. But I don't see that as a problem.
> 
> I also don't see a problem with her punishment of Neville.
> 
> Shaun suspects Neville might have a learning disability, but
> to me, he seems more like an ordinary kid who just happens to
> be more susceptible to stress. 
> 
> Kids in general can't remember anything. They don't remember
> not to slam the door, they don't remember to pick up their
> shoes, they don't remember to keep the bikes out of the drive
> way. That is just typical kid behavior and has far more to do
> with a lack of interest, a lack of attention, and a lack of 
> forethought. BUT, those are the very things a kid needs to
> function in the real world. You don't do kids any favors by
> not demanding that they DO pay attention, that they DO take
> an interest in important things, and if they plan to live a
> long time, that they DO develop Forethought. 
> 
> In my opinion, given them flowers and gold stars is not going
> to help, you must demand it of them, and you must press that
> demand until they comply. And that is exactly what Snape does
> to Neville.

<SNIP> 
> > Steve/bboyminn
>
Mesmer44 replies:

I agree w/ Steve and Shaun in their assessment that McGonagall is not to blame for being overly cruel or wrong in her disciplining of Pavarti and Neville.  As a teacher w/ a Masters degree in Education and a child/adolescent therapist, my perspectives here were more for their future development as students and young adults.  To discipline them consistently for what they have done wrong is in the long run in their best interests. To not do so is not in their best interest for future development as a responsible person. Pavarti will most likely survive certainly any embarrassment she has felt being scolded in front of her friends and will learn a valuable lesson for future social behavior at her job or in other real life social situations.  I didn't get bogged down w/ exactly what biases (if any) McGonagall had in disciplining her, but just viewing it from Pavarti not dressing as she's supposed to and obviously breaking a school dress code, any teacher was well within their rights to call her to task on what she was doing.  Doing it in front of her friends will make it sink in more and is more in line w/ the kind of real world repercussions that would result from frivolous or immature behavior in the future.  As to Neville, I also agree that he deserved to be scolded, but will concede that perhaps in his case he wasn't so much breaking any school rules, but rather being told or reminded not to do so. 
 





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Wed May 20 20:08:24 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 20:08:24 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv1mrg+oov8@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv1nvo+u646@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186683

> Mesmer44 replies:
<SNIP>
>I didn't get bogged down w/ exactly what
biases (if any) McGonagall had in disciplining her, but just viewing it from
Pavarti not dressing as she's supposed to and obviously breaking a school dress
code, any teacher was well within their rights to call her to task on what she
was doing. Doing it in front of her friends will make it sink in more and is
more in line w/ the kind of real world repercussions that would result from
frivolous or immature behavior in the future. <SNIP>

Alla:

Ok, first of all just wanted to acknowledge Shawn's correction that said accident does not happen at the ball. DUH, Alla. However, I totally agree with those that argue that canon does not really show us that Hogwarts's students hairstyles are subject to many rules if ANY rules.

My disagreement here is not whether McGonagall had a right to discipline her in front of her friends. I dislike it, but really, I had seen Hogwarts teachers doing much worse things. My disagreement is whether she actually **did** something wrong and plenty of canon examples were given upthread to show that IMO it does not really look that Hogwarts girls have any regulations about their hair.

I mean one of the real life rules that Shawn quoted upthread stated something about the hair being tied back if they are more than shoulder length, I think.

Um, Hermione anyone? She does not bother to do anything with her hair before the Ball. And really, that's her choice, not that I am chastising her for that. But I would guess that if Hogwarts has any regulations about girls' hair, it would be a very obvious example for JKR to let us hear McGonagall to tell Hermione to do something about it. She does not and IMO that means that students are free to wear whatever hairstyles they like.

So, no, if there are no regulations, and Parvati did nothing wrong, I do not think McGonagall had any right to do so.

I understand that she was freaking out, however she IMO was chastising Parvati for not comforming to **her** taste and that I find obnoxious and wrong.

JMO,

Alla




From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Wed May 20 20:38:39 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 20:38:39 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv1nvo+u646@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv1pof+rnm6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186684

<dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
>
> > Mesmer44 replies:
> <SNIP>
> >I didn't get bogged down w/ exactly what
> biases (if any) McGonagall had in disciplining her, but just viewing it from
> Pavarti not dressing as she's supposed to and obviously breaking a school dress
> code, any teacher was well within their rights to call her to task on what she
> was doing. Doing it in front of her friends will make it sink in more and is
> more in line w/ the kind of real world repercussions that would result from
> frivolous or immature behavior in the future. <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
<Snip>

However, I totally agree with those that argue that canon does not really show us that Hogwarts's students hairstyles are subject to many rules if ANY rules.
> 
> My disagreement here is not whether McGonagall had a right to discipline her in front of her friends. I dislike it, but really, I had seen Hogwarts teachers doing much worse things. My disagreement is whether she actually **did** something wrong and plenty of canon examples were given upthread to show that IMO it does not really look that Hogwarts girls have any regulations about their hair.
> 
<SNIP>

So, no, if there are no regulations, and Parvati did nothing wrong, I do not think McGonagall had any right to do so.
> 
> I understand that she was freaking out, however she IMO was chastising Parvati for not comforming to **her** taste and that I find obnoxious and wrong.
> Alla
>
Steve again:

If there are no regulations concerning whatever Parvati did w/ her hair, and McGonagall's objections weren't based on school rules, then I'll do a 360 degree turn around and agree that Parvati shouldn't have been scolded.  Obviously the students know McGonagall well and I doubt what she said to Parvati was seen as out of character for her and taken w/ a grain of salt by a teen ager scolded by a much older fairly conservative woman. But I do agree w/ Alla that McGonagall's scolding was more a matter of personal taste then an objective assessment of rule breaking.   




From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Wed May 20 20:56:05 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 20:56:05 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gut6f5+go7h@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv1qp5+pnr4@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186685

"Zara" <zgirnius at ...> wrote:
>
> > jkoney
> > It matters because she is the one who created him and has his story in her head/notes. She wrote him with specific thoughts and a certain point of view. At the worst the author can be unable to make you see that point. For me it's Harry naming his son after Snape. That I don't understand, but since she tells me it's true then I will go along with it.
> 
> Zara:
> That Harry Potter gave the middle name Severus to his son, and did so specifically to name him after Snape, is not an opinion of Rowling's hidden away in her notes or revealed to us in some obscure interview. It is a factual occurence within the series that we are shown in the Epilogue of Deathly Hallows. Either that, or we must suppose Harry deliberately lied to his son and there is some other, obscure to me reason that Al Sev is so named that we will never learn.
>
Steve replies:

I also accepted Harry's son as being named after Snape and as it came from JKR, respected that fact more than if it had been written in a fanfic story by someone other tan JKR. Whether or not JKR's opinions came from her notes or in her books, they are still opinions of the author of those books.  JKR didn't stop being the creator of Harry Potter and of Snape and all of the other characters after the books were published.  She still is the author and if she says something about Snape in an interview, it means a lot more to me than a mere fan saying it online.  I don't care if it was in the books or not, it's still JKR saying it and that means more to me than a fan saying it, no matter how many times that fan has read the books.
<SNIP>
> > jkoney:
> > Some people liked Draco in the early books. There was nothing good about him at all in those scenes. He was arrogant, petty, insulting, etc. He would then hide behind Crabbe, Goyle, Snape or his father. How does one see him as a good character at that point?
> 
> Zara:
> How else does one see him, as an evil eleven year old boy? We might reasonably fear he will be walking down a path that might one day lead him into evil; that is another matter. We might also suspect something would divert him from such a path. Both would be equally speculative suppositions (and the latter would be more correct, IMNSVHO). 
> 
> But I would disagree we saw nothing to like about him. His initial approach to Harry, an unknown boy at Madam Malkin's, revealed him to have been raised in some objectionable views by his family, but was otherwise a reasonable depiction of a boy trying to impress another in an attempt to make a friend.
>
Steve replies:

JKoney didn't write that Draco was evil, simply that he wasn't a good character and was arrogant and insulting.  Which IMNSHO is also true. A lot of children want to impress their peers and make friends, HRH as well, but they don't have bullying bodyguards around them to intimidate students that they don't like.  For most of the novels, Malfoy is not a character w/ a lot of fine qualities.    

> > jkoney:
> > Again I see it as a either a failure of the author or a failure of the reader. 
> 
> Zara:
> It seems to be a widely held view, that Severus Snape is perhaps Rowling's finest literary creation to date. Yet there are almost as many opinions about this character as there are readers. *This*, you would call a failure by Rowling? I would call it a triumph. <bg>
>
Steve replies:
IMO and I suspect quite a few others, Rowling's finest literary creation is Harry Potter, not Snape.  Although I do agree that he is one of the most complex and well written fictional characters ever. 





From horridporrid03 at yahoo.com  Wed May 20 22:45:27 2009
From: horridporrid03 at yahoo.com (horridporrid03)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 22:45:27 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gurnv1+ck6a@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv2167+jlmi@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186686

> >>Pippin:
> Huh? There are some  major plot and character developments ahead at this point, namely the Prince's Tale and King's Cross. Harry is about to re-think his whole purpose in life, and to seriously revise his opinion of both Dumbledore and Snape. He doesn't review his own actions in the light of what he's learned, that's left for the reader. Certainly everyone active on this list has done that, though we don't all reach the same conclusions, just as we don't all read the same lessons from history in real life. 
> <snip>

Betsy Hp:
I don't think it's left for the reader, actually.  Certainly a reader *can* go back and reexamine the times Harry may have stumbled, but since the context is never changed (Draco is never recast as a victim in the ferret scene; Harry casting the cruciatus is never written as a moral mistake) I believe they're going against the text when they do so.  I think the reader is expected to just follow along after Harry and adopt his views as their own.  Especially by series end when he has it all figured out.

(I will note, I think it's perfectly reasonable (brilliant even! *g*) to read against the text.  But I think it's a good idea to recognize that this is what's being done.)

And since Harry only reexamines *other* people's lives (he sees and understands the mistakes Snape made; he sees and understands Dumbledore's weakness) but not his own, I don't think Harry actually grows into a man more morally astute than the boy we first meet.  How can he?  He never seriously questions or rethinks his own actions.  Other people are led astray by their obsessions, but Harry has not (per his view, and I think the text's view as well) ever made that sort of mistake.

> >>Pippin:
> <snip>
> The readers have the choice to regard Harry in the comforting  way that his fans in the WW like to see him, as Harry once saw Dumbledore, as a man who believes in truth and justice and would never abuse his power.  Or we can see him as canon actually shows him to us, as a person who would abuse his power under certain circumstances, just like everybody else. 

Betsy Hp:
I agree that canon shows Harry as someone who'd abuse power.  What I don't agree with is that canon shows us this consciously.  I see Harry as very much the wealthy, popular, beloved of the powers that be, type of student.  All the girls and boys want to date him or be him.  I think canon shows this to be true.  I *also* think canon wants us to see, and honestly believes it's telling us, that Harry is a poor, little, under-dog, constantly fighting against the man to get even a modicum of fair treatment. 

It's a fascinating contradiction, but one born of mistake rather than purpose as far as I can tell.  I think JKR feels Harry really is a type who'd not abuse his power, and that she showed us this by having him refuse the Elder Wand (or refuse power).  None of his other problematic moments need apply.  We don't need to reexamine them (as Harry doesn't) because they're not really problems to begin with.

> >>Pippin: 
> So you see, we don't get a moment where anyone thinks -- oh, I've been a bad person, I've got to change,  because being a moral person will not in itself help you to control your aggression. It will help you to see that it should be controlled, but most people over the age of two know that, and most people get better at it as they mature. As I've said before, there's scarcely a Death Eater who isn't shown as a baby in some way.

Betsy Hp:
Sure we do.  Snape, Dumbledore, even Ron have their moments when they confess to being bad people and express an urge to change.  Harry doesn't have such a moment, but I think it's because we're not supposed to think he needs one.

Betsy Hp




From horridporrid03 at yahoo.com  Wed May 20 23:45:39 2009
From: horridporrid03 at yahoo.com (horridporrid03)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 23:45:39 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <guv9t1+d8th@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv24n3+n9kl@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186687

> >>jkoney:
> > > You may be able to interpret the characters as you see fit, but that doesn't mean you are interpreting the way they were intended to be interpreted.

> >>Zara:
> > Nor did I state I was. Nor is it important to me that I do so.

> >>jkoney replies:
> That I don't understand. You don't feel the need to understand the story as it was meant to be told?

Betsy Hp:
For myself I can say I like to get an idea of how the story was meant to be told, but I reserve the right to disagree.  Does that make sense?  

This series provided a unique opportunity because I was reading it and interpreting it as the author was writing it.  And because it was set up in a mystery-like fashion (who can Harry trust?) I felt we, as readers, were being invited by the author to figure out the characters for ourselves.  I think JKR meant for this to happen (though only to a very tightly drawn extent) with Snape. But because she opened up one character to reader interpretation, they all became fair game. I strongly believe (mainly because Snape was the only "surprise" turn around of any noteworthiness) that JKR did not mean for this to happen.

> >> jkoney:
> > > Some people liked Draco in the early books. There was nothing good about him at all in those scenes. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
Oh, not true!  As someone who grew up with "Malory Towers" (a "school-days" series) Draco seemed prime to become Harry's best friend. Everything about our first scene with him screamed "learning moment to come".  So that's an example of my personal experience trumping what the author was trying to get across.

Because I was expecting the turn around I noted that Draco, despite his claim of being deeply beloved by his parents, was left completely alone in the dress shop.  I noted that he was trying desperately to become Harry's friend (which I thought rather sweet), and I cringed *for* Draco because he was so ignorantly going about it the wrong way.

Then there was Hagrid's impossible to condone "Slytherins are all bad" statement.  ("Oh, there's a moral hidden in that one," thought I.)  And there was the fact that when he had the ammunition to get Harry kicked out of school (the hidden dragon plot), Draco chose not to use it.  It seemed so obvious he was still wanting to be friends, that he and Harry thought the same way (dragons are cool!), and that, like with Hermione and the troll, all it needed was one good adventure for the two boys to realize they really weren't that different.

Now obviously, seven books later, I *completely* misread where JKR was taking Draco.  Just as obviously, JKR completely failed to give me the proper impression of the boy.

Betsy Hp




From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 00:21:44 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 00:21:44 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gv24n3+n9kl@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv26qo+uh3h@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186688

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "horridporrid03" <horridporrid03 at ...> wrote:
>
>> > >>jkoney replies:
> > That I don't understand. You don't feel the need to understand the story as it was meant to be told?
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> For myself I can say I like to get an idea of how the story was meant to be told, but I reserve the right to disagree.  Does that make sense?  

jkoney:
I can agree with that. I still don't agree with the fact that none of the Malfoy's were sent to prison for at least some punishment.

 
> > >> jkoney:
> > > > Some people liked Draco in the early books. There was nothing good about him at all in those scenes. <snip>
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Oh, not true!  As someone who grew up with "Malory Towers" (a "school-days" series) Draco seemed prime to become Harry's best friend. Everything about our first scene with him screamed "learning moment to come".  So that's an example of my personal experience trumping what the author was trying to get across.

jkoney:
Aren't you then ignoring what was written? If not at that point, which I didn't read as generously as you did, what about the train scene? Draco insults Ron and then threatens Harry about meeting the same end as his parents. I definitely think the author is trying to say that these two aren't going to be friends.


> Betsy Hp
> snip>
> 
> Then there was Hagrid's impossible to condone "Slytherins are all bad" statement.  ("Oh, there's a moral hidden in that one," thought I.)  And there was the fact that when he had the ammunition to get Harry kicked out of school (the hidden dragon plot), Draco chose not to use it.  It seemed so obvious he was still wanting to be friends, that he and Harry thought the same way (dragons are cool!), and that, like with Hermione and the troll, all it needed was one good adventure for the two boys to realize they really weren't that different.

jkoney:
You thought he still wanted to be friends with Harry? 


> 
> Now obviously, seven books later, I *completely* misread where JKR was taking Draco.  Just as obviously, JKR completely failed to give me the proper impression of the boy.
> 
> Betsy Hp
>
jkoney:
JKR has Draco threaten Harry: "I'd be carful if I were you , Potter."
"Unless youre a bit politer you'll go the same way as your parents. They didn't know what was good for them, either."

To me that was the gauntlet being thrown down. I'm not sure she could have been much more direct about how we were supposed to view Draco.




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 00:47:54 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 00:47:54 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_and_some_Avatar_spoilers_WAS:__Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__?=
In-Reply-To: <gv24n3+n9kl@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv28bq+724o@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186689

> Betsy Hp:
<SNIP>
> Because I was expecting the turn around I noted that Draco, despite his claim of being deeply beloved by his parents, was left completely alone in the dress shop.  I noted that he was trying desperately to become Harry's friend (which I thought rather sweet), and I cringed *for* Draco because he was so ignorantly going about it the wrong way.
<SNIP>

Alla:
Heh, just as I could never understand where this argument of Draco not really being loved by his parents comes from. Because I happen to believe that I do eat these kinds of stories with the spoon and when for example Zuco from Avatar claims that his daddy loves him, well I do not really believe him. Because we are treated to the flashback soon after those words when Zuco's daddy gives him that awful wound. I guess he wanted to teach his kid sportsmanship or something.

Anyways, to me Avatar writers were absolutely clear here, so when Zuco keeps saying it, all that I am thinking oh you poor deluded child, you have to figure things out and soon. And boy his journey did not disappoint me.

But when Draco says that his parents love him? Um, I do not know how many more support for that JKR could have put in the text? Brooms for whole team? Here you go Draco, have them. Yes, his father wanted him to get good grades, yes, to me it is the sign that his father loves and cares for his child, because he wants him to be well educated. My parents wanted me to have good grades too and yes, I thought it was a sign of how much they loved me.

Narcissa would not let her baby to go far away from her, won't she?  I thought it is totally a sign of spoiled mama boy that she won't let him go to Durmstrang. And of course there is nothing wrong with sending sweets to your child to boarding school. I however am very hard pressed to think of it as anything else but the sign of love his parents feel for him.

In short, I never ever doubted that Draco is the apple of both Narcissa and Lucius eyes. I just thought that apple is deeply rotten from inside.

And of course book seven to me confirmed just how much they loved him.

Oh and yes, I agree that Draco wanted to be friends with Harry, I just never thought that it was for any other reason than to make Lucius' even more proud of Draco.

JMO,

Alla





From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Thu May 21 01:05:02 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 01:05:02 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <guuqq4+7etq@eGroups.com>
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No: HPFGUIDX 186690


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> Steve wrote:
> > 
> > "she has her opinion on the matter and we are free to have our own? She's the author for goodness sake.  She has a lot more than just an opinion on the matter, as she created the character of Snape and wrote thousands of words and several dozen scenes him in them.  If JKR says that Snape was a very sadistic teacher, that holds a whole heck of a lot more credence with me and than coming from a reader who for very subjective personal reasons doesn't like what KKR wrote or how she presented a character.  Yes, with all due respect to any fan or reader, you do have the right to personally dislike how an author wrote or views their literary characters to be sure.  But do you have an equal right with the author to interpret the nature of a character created by that author?  I don't think so, and most authors I've talked to sure don't think so. Authors love their readers to have all kinds of reactions to their work, to be sure.  But when a reader equates their opinions of what a character is like as equal to or superior to the literary intention and perception of the author, then I have to side w/ the author.  They wrote it, you didn't. If you want to think of Frodo and Sam as being gay, be my guest, but don't think your opinion on the matter is better than or holds more weight in credibility than Tolkiens does. 
> 
> Carol responds:
> 
> I've already expressed my views on this subject on the OT list, so I'll just summarize. Literary critics or analysts (including readers in general on an amateur level) have a choice of whether to consider an author's expressed intentions when they interpret a literary work. No author can be aware of all his own intentions (some are unconscious and so ingrained in the author's thinking that the author is unaware of them); the intentions may change as he or writes; or the intentions may not have been carried out. A simple example of the last category is JKR's intention to bring the Slytherins back into the battle of Hogwarts behind Slughorn. She may see the scene that way in her mind, but many readers who closely examine the text do not. By the same token, some readers don't perceive Dumbledore as gay even though JKR says that she "always thought of him" in that way. In other words, what matters to me and to many professional literary critics is not what the author says about the text or a particular character (especially Snape, about whom she was keeping secrets and whom she wanted her readers to perceive as Harry did until the revelations of "The Prince's Tale," which were *intended* (whether they succeeded or not is another matter) to change the reader's perception of Snape just as they changed Harry's.
> 
> If we take JKR's statements about anything, whether it's House Elves or Harry's ideal wife as definitive, we might as well stop discussing the books. But it doesn't work that way. We all bring our own perceptions, values, education, and cultural background to the books, and we are, indeed, free to disagree with any statements that JKR or any author makes with regard to the books and characters. She's not infallible; she makes mistakes (she still doesn't understand why many careful readers talk about "the missing twenty-four hours" in SS/PS; she doesn't always check her facts, so the books are sometimes inconsistent with one another; and, most important, she doesn't always succeed in her intentions. Not all readers will laugh at the lines and scenes that she intends to be humorous. Not all readers will be moved by the scenes that she finds most moving. Not all readers will like the same characters that she likes. (Certainly, few of us still consider Dumbledore to be "the epitome of goodness," whether that statement expresses her true intention or merely what she wanted the readers to think at the time that she spoke those words.)
> 
> Sorry--I didn't mean to go on at such length. But a writer's intentions, like those of any artist, are not always clear to the reader even when those intentions are stated. The meaning of a work changes with each reader and over time. (We don't perceive the statues of Phidias the same way that Phidias and the Greeks in general did, even if they still had their original paint.) There would be no point in literary criticism if every reader saw the same book in the same way. No reader--none--can see a book exactly the way that the author intended it to be read. Even JKR may see the books differently on a rereading than she did when she wrote them. It's human nature not only to react to what we read but to interpret and to analyze.
> 
> I really don't care how JKR intended me to perceive Snape or Dumbledore or Harry or Ron or Hermione or Dobby or Griphook or any other character. I look at the text itself and, based on my own education and experience, I interpret it. I see, for example, literary devices like the unreliable narrator and analyze the way those devices work in the text whether the author was conscious of using those devices or not.
> 
> Carol, who would not want any author, whether it's JKR or Shakespeare or Tolstoy, to dictate her interpretation of a literary work
>
Steve answers:  Who's asking for an author to dictate your interpretation of their literary work? Certainly not me. All fans have the right to interpret JKR's work or any author's work as they deem fit.  My points have primarily been that an author's opinions and statements about their works, particularly JKR, carry more weight w/ me than a fan or a literary critic's opinions. It's been mentioned a few times that JKR isn't the most reliable person to have an opinion on her work, due to her own biases and subjective views towards her work. Well, many fans, perhaps even most fans have their own personal biases and subjective views about JKR's books as well. There are a lot of fans out there for whom Snape, or Draco, or Harry, or Kreacher, or some other character can either do no wrong or do no right and who will either constantly criticize that character or constantly apologize for and defend everything that character does w/o ever considering objectively and honestly another POV on the matter. I am simply saying that personal biases notwithstanding, I value JKR's opinions about the characters she created more than I do amateur or even so called "professional" literary critics or fans. (Not that I don't value literary critics, as before I read some books I go online to see what the critics have to say on that book or author to hopefully get a helpful perspective). 

I have never believed that readers don't have a right to discuss and interpret an author's work to their hearts content.  As president of one of the largest science fiction clubs in the midwest, I've enjoyed discussing for over 30 years the works of all kinds of authors, with the authors and their fans.  I just really feel at times that it has become too easy to criticize or bash JKR. Discuss and argue til the cows come home about everything and anything that author has written and said.  But please do it with some respect and consideration for what that author has given us.  That's all I have to say on the matter.  Please forgive this being off topic, but I can barely find time to be on HPFGU, let alone be on OT chat as well.  And I did want to respond to this post. Steve




From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 01:10:28 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 01:10:28 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
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No: HPFGUIDX 186691

> > >> jkoney:
> > > > Some people liked Draco in the early books. There was nothing good about him at all in those scenes. <snip>
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Oh, not true!  As someone who grew up with "Malory Towers" (a "school-days" series) Draco seemed prime to become Harry's best friend. Everything about our first scene with him screamed "learning moment to come".  So that's an example of my personal experience trumping what the author was trying to get across.
> 
> Because I was expecting the turn around I noted that Draco, despite his claim of being deeply beloved by his parents, was left completely alone in the dress shop.  I noted that he was trying desperately to become Harry's friend (which I thought rather sweet), and I cringed *for* Draco because he was so ignorantly going about it the wrong way.


Montavilla47:

I never read the Malory Towers series, but there was something
compelling about Draco.  What I liked was that, even though his
first meeting with Harry didn't exactly go well, he was willing to 
offer friendship to him.  

Granted, there were benefits to being friends with the famous
Harry Potter.  And Draco was very snotty about the way he 
went about it.  But he offered his hand and there was definitely
something noble about that.

And yes, he was exactly the kind of character who seems snotty,
but later terms out to be the hero's friend and foil.  Or, like Prince
Ellidyr in "The Black Cauldron," ends up doing something 
important for the good guys, even though he isn't exactly 
one.

So, yes, I was one of those who thought there was going to 
be more to Draco than just an unpleasant bully.  I was wrong,
but at least I was in good company.






From drednort at alphalink.com.au  Thu May 21 02:49:19 2009
From: drednort at alphalink.com.au (Shaun Hately)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 12:49:19 +1000
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
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No: HPFGUIDX 186692

> a_svirn:
> And Gryffindor colours are red and gold. I can totally see Parvati wearing 
> an
> ornamental butterfly in her House colours, which would be considered too 
> gaudy
> by St. Hilda's standards. Not that we have any reason to believe that 
> Hogwats
> regulations are anywhere near as strict as St: Hilda's: otherwise Luna 
> would
> have spent her entire time in Hogwarts in detention. McGonagall in this 
> scene
> reprimands Parvati for her taste, which is a personal attack and therefore
> inappropriate.


Shaun:

First of all, just a question - do you have any real life experience of 
school uniforms? I ask because to me, a lot of what I am saying is coming 
first and

foremost from a perspective of over twenty years experiences of such things 
as a child and as an adult. I attended seven different schools as a child, 
all of

which had uniforms, and as a teacher I've taught in seven schools, all of 
which have uniforms (in Australia, while they are not quite universal, most 
schools

do have them). These schools have had a range of different types of 
uniforms, and a range of how seriously they enforced them.

Of the five co-educational schools I attended as a child (ie, schools with 
girls in them) and of the seven I've taught in, all but one of those schools 
set

rules about what girls were and were not allowed to have in their hair. St 
Hilda's standard which I have quoted is not an unusually strict standard. 
It'sa

reasonably typical one. I am not arguing for Hogwarts having unusual school 
uniform rules. I'm arguing that it probably has fairly normal ones.

No uniformed school I am aware of that sets rules or has expectations 
concerning girls hair would regard a large ornamental butterfly as an 
acceptable hair

ornament on a formal occasion.

As for Luna - some people seem to be under the impression that Luna is 
always wearing something odd. Reading through the books, I don't think that 
is the

case. We are told she is wearing her radish earrings (actually they are 
dirgible plums, IIRC) on precisely one occasion that I can find. We are told 
that she

is wearing a butterbeer cork necklace on only one occasion that I can find. 
We are told she is wearing a set of Spectrespecs on only one occasion I can 
find.

And that's it. There's no real reason I can find to suppose that Luna 
constantly goes around wearing odd things. She does so sometimes, but on 
none of the

three occasions that are mentioned is it an unusually formal school 
occasion, as it on the occasion we see Parvarti reprimanded. I'd also point 
out that

Professor McGonagall does not give Parvarti a detention for wearing the 
butterfly, she merely tells her to remove it, so there's no reason to think 
Luna

would ever wind up in detention even if she does wear weird stuff 
sometimes - more likely she'd just be told to take it off.


a_svirn:
> Yes, that would be bad form indeed. But we don't know if Neville noticed
> that his list had gone missing, and McGonagall did not bother to find out.
>  As for not taking the proper care of it, I'd say that leaving it in the
> dormitory was actually pretty sensible. He had no reason to suspect his
> house-mates, did he? And knowing his propensity for loosing things he
> didn't trust himself enough to carry it on his person.


Shaun:

Actually we do know that Neville noticed that his list had gone missing. The 
text tells us he did - on Thursday evening as Harry returns to the Tower 
after

having his Firebolt returned, Neville is pleading with Sir Cadogan to let 
him in without the password because he has lost his list - he doesn't know 
where

it's gone. He doesn't know what he's done with it. It's not until over two 
days after this that Professor McGonagall finds out that he made the list 
and lost

it - so he knew it had happened.

As for not taking proper care of it - he has no idea where it's gone. If 
he'd been taking proper care of the list, he would have either realised he'd 
lost it

earlier, or when he realised he didn't have it on him on returning to the 
Tower, would be assuming it's still sitting on his bedside table (which is 
where

Crookshanks stole it from). He's not saying to Sir Cadogan - "I left the 
list in my room." He says he doesn't have any idea where it is.

a_svirn:
> You didn't address in your response the other side of the issue, though.
> How about the fact that McGonagall's own arrangements put Neville in the
> loose-loose situation, and when he predictably enough lost, he was the
> only one who was punished? Didn't McGonagall as a responsible adult bear
> a greater responsibility for what had occurred?

Shaun:

I didn't address that point because I'm not sure why you think McGonagall's 
arrangements are at fault here. After the Fat Lady was damaged, Sir Cadogan 
took

on the role of Gryffindor Tower's guardian but that was not Professor 
McGonagall's decision. Professor Dumbledore tells Percy that he has arranged 
a

temporary guardian for Gryffindor Tower - Professor McGonagall didn't make 
the choice (and, though I can't immediately find the reference, I seem to 
recall

Sir Cadogan was chosen because nobody else would do it, so it wasn't much of 
a choice).

As for the idea that adults should bear a greater responsibility than 
children when things go wrong, that's not a simple issue - because if adults 
don't give

children responsibility for things, the child will not develop the skills 
they need to become functioning adults themselves. As a teacher you need to 
give

children the chance to be responsible. You need to give them the chance to 
make mistakes. It'd be much easier and much more comfortable a lot of the 
time if

you didn't do it - if you kept the kids wrapped up in cotton wool and 
protected them from everything. But if you do that, you're not doing them 
any good in

the long run.

You have to find a balance between giving kids the chance to learn 
responsibility, and not putting too much on them. I don't believe the 
expectations being

placed on Neville in this case are unreasonable.

In a sense, the list of passwords to Gryffindor Tower could be viewed as 
being equivalent to a house key. Losing them could be considered equivalent 
to

losing your front door key.

Is it reasonable to expect a 13 year old boy to have a house key given that 
it's a normal expectation that he will be passing through that door on a 
regular

basis? I believe it is. Is it reasonable to expect a 13 year old boy to take 
good care of that house key to the extent that even if he forgets to carry 
it

occasionally, he has least some idea where he last left it? I believe it is. 
And is it reasonable to expect him to tell you if he loses his house key? I

believe it is.

And I believe it is even if that boy does have memory issues. That might 
make the second of those two expectations somewhat more difficult for him, 
but it

shouldn't impact the first or the third to any significant degree.

And in a sense, it's even more important you do this with kids who have 
learning difficulties. If you allow a child's learning difficulties to stop 
you

letting them do things they should be capable of, then you're not doing the 
child a service. You're actually doing them a great disservice. There are 
limits

- no child with a learning difficulty should ever be knowingly be placed in 
a situation which their LD actually prevents them from doing. But placing 
them in

a situation where they are expected to do what other children their age do 
when you know they are capable of it, even if they find it harder, is 
generally a

good thing.

Yes, you have to make some allowances for them, some accomodations. But the 
idea is to give the child only those accomodations that they actually need, 
and

not give them accomodations to the level that you start to retard their 
development of skills they are capable of.

If I was Neville's teacher in place of McGonagall, I probably wouldn't fault 
him at all for writing the passwords down (although I'd also be teaching him

strategies - which I know as a four year trained teacher who took special 
education as one of my 'majors' - that generally work for CAPD students to 
deal

with memory problems). And if he lost the passwords and came to me and told 
me he'd lost them - then I would be understanding about it at that time. But 
to

find out only when the loss of the passwords has put other students at risk 
as well as himself, despite the fact that two days have passed... yes, I'd 
be

angry and my response would probably not be that disimilar to McGonagall's.

Especially seeing that I'd probably be on the point of near terror myself - 
a mass murderer has managed to infiltrate the place where seventy children 
I'm

personally responsible for *sleep*. It's bordering on my worst nightmare.

(Incidentally, while I don't fault Professor McGonagall for what she did at 
the time, I do think the punishments she imposed on Neville were somewhat

excessive. A detention and banning him from going to Hogsmeade - he didn't 
need both of those. One would have been enough, especially as I am sure that

Neville was also personally devastated by the realisation his carelessness 
had put his friends at risk).

a_svirn:
> We know enough to conclude that he performed better in the classless
> where he wasn't constantly reprimanded. We haven't seen a single
> Astronomy lesson, but as for Divination, Trelawney definitely bullied
> him, and very elaborately so.

Shaun:

I don't believe Trelawney did bully Neville. She used him as a focus for her 
teaching, which I think she did inappropriately, but I don't see any 
bullying of

Neville in her classes. She bullied Hermione in my view, but not Neville. 
And while I agree we don't know anything of what happens in Astronomy, do 
you

believe Hagrid bullied Neville in Care of Magical Creatures? Do you believe 
Professor Binn bullied Neville in History of Magic? That doesn't seem to me 
to be

in line with their personalities at all (or complete lack of personality in 
the case of Professor Binns).

a_svirn:
> Well, I guess I disagree with Sax on this one. An admittedly
> superficial research on internet revealed that his point of
> view is not all that widely accepted and is in fact often
> described as "controversial". Moreover, McGonagall behaviour can
> arguably be qualified as "disability discrimination".


Shaun:

You're perfectly entitled to disagree with Sax on this point or any other. 
My point in mentioning him though is that his views are a completely valid 
set of

views for a competent teacher to hold - not all teachers agree with him, by 
any means, but there's no reason all teachers should. No theorist has the 
only

answers. The approaches he advocates are a valid part of mainstream teaching 
and a teacher can be a good teacher following his views.

Sax's views are somewhat controversial in the United States - but they're 
not really controversial anywhere else, and the main reason they've become

controversial in the US is because he's telling American educators that a 
large part of the reason why America is falling behind most other 
industrialised

nations in secondary level education (despite being a world leader at 
primary level) is because America has embraced educational methods that 
don't work very

well for adolescent students. His views are not particularly controversial 
in either Australia or the UK, for example, where significant numbers of 
schools

have never stopped using the methods that he advocates and where they are 
considered a valid part of mainstream education.

And speaking as a special education specialist, I really cannot see how 
Professor McGonagall's behaviour could ever be described as a form of 
disability

discrimination. It is not discriminatory to expect a LD student to reach 
normal standards when his results indicate that he can reach normal 
standards.

I feel very sorry for Neville. He has a problem that makes education harder 
for him and that's very unfair. But there's two basic ways a teacher can 
deal

with that. The 'pink slipper' 'fluffy blanket' approach "dere, dere, 
diddums, we'll make things easy for you at school, and we won't worry about 
your

future." or the 'climbing boot' 'crash helmet' approach "I know it's rough, 
kid. I know it's tough, kid. But you have to learn to work even harder than

everybody else so you have the chance to do whatever you want to try when 
you grow up."

Neville Longbottom. Hero the Battle of the Department of Mysteries. Hero of 
the Battle of Hogwarts. Neville Longbottom, Auror. Professor Neville 
Longbottom

of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?

Do you think that Neville Longbottom would have preferred to have his 
teachers tell him "We know this is hard for you, so we're going to let you 
take it

easy?"

I don't.


> Pippin:
> Luna is a Ravenclaw and her appearance is therefore Flitwick's
> responsibility. If he chooses to be lax that does not mean that
> McGonagall has to be lax also. I agree that McGonagall's
> irritation shows she is tense about the situation, and she may
> normally be inclined to let minor lapses pass. But she is acting
> 'in loco parentis' and you'd better believe that parents have the
> right to educate  their childrens' taste and to demand a certain
> standard of appearance on formal occasions.

Shaun:

The point about being 'in loco parentis' is well made - and it does make a 
difference in some situations. To an extent, a teacher *does* have some 
responsibility to try and impose standards of acceptable behaviour on 
students and a teacher in a boarding school where they see the kids for far 
more of the year than their parents do has something of an increased 
responsibility in this regard.

But personally, I'm inclined to the view that McGonagall is taking action 
here because Parvarti is not observing an understood rule about what is and 
isn't acceptable attire and ornamentation under the rules of the school, 
rather than basing her decision on a personal view.

Pippin:
> *We* may know that stress makes memory problems worse, and therefore
> being aggressive with Neville is exactly the wrong thing to do. But
> there's no canon that anyone in the wizarding world knows that.
> In the WW, the only known way to compensate for a learning problem is
> to try harder, and that's what Snape and McGonagall are trying to make
> Neville do.

Shaun:

Actually we don't know that stress makes memory problems worse. The research 
evidence is that, for boys at least, stress improves memory. Only up to a 
particular point - extreme stress is another matter. But a reasonable degree 
of stress has been pretty clearly shown to improve test performance for 
boys. In my view, Neville finds Snape's classes so stressful that he's 
definitely moving into the extreme stress situation there, but I've seen no 
evidence of that level of stress in McGonagall's classes.

Pippin:
> McGonagall may be doing it because she cares about her students, and
> Snape may be doing it because he cares about his exceptionally high
> pass rate, but in neither case, IMO, are they trying to make things
> worse, although unfortunately that's the result.

Again, in Professor McGonagall's class, I think the results are probably 
positive - Neville achieves an Adequate OWL which is broadly speaking in 
line with his marks in general.

a_svirn:
> I wasn't discussing teachers' rights (though I don't believe they
> are equal to those of parents); I was merely saying that McGonagall's
> behaviour in this scene is petty. Parents can be petty too. I'd say
> ridiculing a teenage daughter's taste in jewellery is not the best
> strategy to improve it.

Shaun:

Here we get into a really esoteric area - the legal basis of teaching. You 
may not agree that teachers' rights are equal to those of parents (and I 
absolutely believe that they shouldn't be) but unfortunately, perhaps for 
both of us, it's a long held principle of British common law that they are. 
The doctrine of 'in loco parentis' goes back literally to the middle ages 
and all indications are still very strong that it applies at Hogwarts (the 
only time we ever see a permission slip required of students is when they 
are going to be allowed to leave the grounds of the school to go into 
Hogsmeade, in other words, when they might arguably be stepping outside the 
authority of the school.

In a boarding school situation, the concept of in loco parentis is actually 
fairly critical. It's a doctrine that is intended to protect children more 
than anything else - by placing a duty on their teachers that they should 
act as a good parent would.

The thing is, even if a teacher doesn't agree that they should have equal 
rights to parents (and I, for one, think that's a rather questionable 
proposition) if as a teacher you find yourself in a situation where that is 
the legal basis for your authority to teach and sets the conditions on what 
you are supposed to do, you have to observe it. You can't not do it, just 
because you don't agree with it. You're not supposed to put personal beliefs 
above the law.

I also don't see where McGonagall is ridiculing Parvarti's taste in 
jewellery as opposed to merely enforcing an accepted standard of behaviour.

Steve:
> Good to hear from you again Shaun, we missed you smiling face,
> and your intelligent comments.

Shaun:

Thank you, Steve.

Steve:
> I'm going to make some broad comments on your post, but I don't
> believe they will be specific enough to quote you directly.
>
> First we need to get rid of this modern notion that everybody
> should feel good all the time. This is especially true of kids.
> You do kids a disservice if you convince them that life is like
> a Disney cartoon, where very thing is bright and happy. THAT
> does not prepare them for the real world. That is my opinion,
> does far more harm that good in the long run.

Shaun:

I agree entirely. I think a great deal of harm has been done to a great many 
students by these ideas over the past few decades and naturally enough, I'm 
not particularly in favour of them. Nor should schools go to the other 
extreme, which, unfortunately, did sometimes happen in the past. But it's 
possible to find a balance between the two extremes.

Steve:
> Next, to the idea of treating everyone the same. I put 'every
> one equal' as being one notch below 'zero tolerance'. To me
> 'zero tolerance' means zero brains, zero effort, zero
> responsibility. It is the worst policy ever, and is alway
> doomed to ultimate failure as one size fits all, means no
> size fits anyone. The list of colossal failure (and lawsuits)
> resulting from Zero Tolerance is unfathomable.


Shaun:

Yes, again, I agree entirely.


Steve:
> So, now let's look at McGonagall, while she is certainly strict,
> she seems completely fair. She will punish a Gryffindor just as
> quickly and easily as she will punish a Slytherin. Though, she
> does show a slight favoritism on rare occasion, usually
> involving Quiditch. But I don't see that as a problem.

Shaun:

The thing is there is nothing wrong with a bit of partisanship in a school - 
and in a school which has a House system and which has teachers associated 
with those Houses, you should expect there to be some degree of it during 
house competitions. Also, Professor McGonagall is the closest thing to a 
parent the Gryffindor kids have at the school, and there are occasional 
situations where it's appropriate for a teacher in that type of relationship 
to show a particular bit of favouritism towards their students. But only to 
the point that it's helping them, not harming them.

Snape's favouritism of Slytherin at times seems to involve excusing 
behaviour in them which shouldn't be excused. That's never appropriate. But 
it'd be no more appropriate if Professor McGonagall did it for Neville - and 
yet, some people seem to believe that that is what she should do in the case 
of the incident outside the Tower door.

Steve:
> I also don't see a problem with her punishment of Neville.
>
> Shaun suspects Neville might have a learning disability, but
> to me, he seems more like an ordinary kid who just happens to
> be more susceptible to stress.

Shaun:

I'd put my position more strongly than that. I don't suspect Neville might 
have a learning disability - I'm absolutely convinced he does. I'd go to the 
bank on that. I am only fairly certain though that it's CAPD - I wouldn't 
stand up in court and swear that it is CAPD, though I would be prepared to 
swear there's something there.

Incidentally, being more susceptible to stress *is* a learning disability in 
itself, and is a symptom of quite a few others. I think a lot of people feel 
LDs are rare or unusual - they're not. Quite a few of them are part of the 
normal spectrum of learning behaviour.

Steve:
> Kids in general can't remember anything. They don't remember
> not to slam the door, they don't remember to pick up their
> shoes, they don't remember to keep the bikes out of the drive
> way. That is just typical kid behavior and has far more to do
> with a lack of interest, a lack of attention, and a lack of
> forethought. BUT, those are the very things a kid needs to
> function in the real world. You don't do kids any favors by
> not demanding that they DO pay attention, that they DO take
> an interest in important things, and if they plan to live a
> long time, that they DO develop Forethought.

Shaun:

Neville's problem though seems to be worse than normal. That's why I say he 
has an LD. Something becomes an LD when it starts negatively impacting a 
child's ability to perform. Quite a few LDs are simply 'normal 
characteristics to an abnormal extent'. But even when this is the case, you 
are right - kids need to function in the real world and you don't do them 
any favours by excusing them from that when they are still capable of doing 
it, even if it's harder for them than normal.

An LD diagnosis is an explanation. It is *not* an excuse. There's a big 
difference.

Steve:
> In my opinion, given them flowers and gold stars is not going
> to help, you must demand it of them, and you must press that
> demand until they comply. And that is exactly what Snape does
> to Neville. He demands the Neville pay attention and think
> ahead.
>
> Certainly his methods make us feel sorry for Neville, who seems
> something of a sad clown to start with. But is alleviating the
> 'sorry' we feel helping us, or is it helping Neville? I think
> it has more to do with us than Neville.

Shaun:

I actually do think Snape's approach is wrong for Neville. But it's probably 
a good approach for virtually every other kid in the class (including Harry 
when we just talk about Snape's teaching - some of the other things he does 
with Harry are not good). I can certainly believe Snape is doing what he 
thinks is in Neville's interests though - I think he expects his methods to 
work because they normally do. I just don't think they are right for 
Neville.

Steve:
> Now Snape is not nice, but 'not nice' is a far cry from
> Sadistic. Snape is often mean and within a limited context,
> cruel. But teachers are not suppose to be your friends, they are
> not your buddy. There are there to demand and to make sure you
> achieve at a certain level, and if that means being your
> enemy to make it happen, so be it.
>
> So some extent that seems to be what Shaun is saying, the
> job at hand is far far more important than whether you like
> me as a teacher or as a person.
>
> Notice that Snape's student get good results, well above what
> we assume is average, in the qualifications tests. Every
> student hates him, but they learn potions and learn it well,
> because that is precisely what Snape demands.

Shaun:

I had a couple of *very* Snape like teachers at school. One of them in 
particular... he absolutely terrified me at times in a way not all that 
dissimilar to the way Neville is terrified of Snape. He was bitingly 
sarcastic, absolutely uncompromising, completely unsympathetic, and expected 
excellence.

I didn't appreciate him at the time. I probably hated him to be honest. I 
certainly feared him - and with good reason, he caned me a couple of times 
(for things I didn't think he should have).

It was only in my senior classes - when we finally got down to a different 
style of teaching (having eliminated everybody who couldn't meet his 
standards) that I came to understand the man a bit better. He loved his 
subject with a passion, and he wanted to pass that passion on to his best 
students - and that means he had to create those students.

In recent years, I've spoken to him a few times and on one of those 
occasions, I mentioned to him how much Severus Snape reminded me of him. I 
told him that I often thought about him when I was discussing Snape. I 
explained to him why I felt that way and asked him if he had any comment. He 
gave me the following statement and his permission to quote it.

"I am the best Classics Master in this country. I am an extremely effective 
teacher. What I am not is warm and cuddly. I don't know how to be. But I do 
know how to turn obnoxious adolescent boys into people capable of 
appreciating the combined culture of 25 centuries. Personally I think that's 
worth doing. If I can't do it without making a few boys cry. Tough. They'll 
thank me for it as adults. Or they'll hate me. Either way, they'll be better 
for it."

Somehow I think he and Snape would get on well together.

The thing is he's right. I don't hate him, now. I haven't since he was one 
of the few teachers I had who made the long trip to attend my father's 
funeral when he died just after the end of my second year at that school. He 
didn't offer a word of comfort. I'm really not sure he knew how to do things 
like that. But he came despite the fact I'd caused him nothing but... well, 
angst by failing to do what I could and should and was capable of, and 
despite the fact that he must have realised how much I hated him.

But I do thank him for what he gave me every single day. And, by Heavens, 
I'm glad he taught me.


Alla:
> Ok, first of all just wanted to acknowledge Shawn's correction that
> said accident does not happen at the ball. DUH, Alla. However, I
> totally agree with those that argue that canon does not really show
> us that Hogwarts's students hairstyles are subject to many rules if ANY 
> rules.

Shaun:

Here's where I think part of my disagreement with other people may come 
from. I assume that Hogwart's *does* set some sort of rules or standards 
with regards to student's hair. Why?

Because I have rarely encountered any school which has school uniform rules 
that doesn't. In fact, I don't think I have *ever* encountered a school 
which had uniform rules which didn't have some sort of rules to hair. I've 
seen a few that don't seem to try enforcing them at all, judging by their 
students, but to me, I would assume any school with a uniform had some sort 
of rules on hair unless evidence was provided that they didn't.

Alla:
> My disagreement here is not whether McGonagall had a right to
> discipline her in front of her friends. I dislike it, but really,
> I had seen Hogwarts teachers doing much worse things. My
> disagreement is whether she actually **did** something wrong and
> plenty of canon examples were given upthread to show that IMO it
> does not really look that Hogwarts girls have any regulations about
> their hair.

Shaun:

Personally I prefer in most cases that discipline be handled privately, but 
at the same time to be effective, reprimands need to be delivered as quickly 
after detection of the offence as possible - if you're going to give a kid a 
long and detailed telling off, you really should do it in private (except in 
exceptional circumstances), but a quick reprimand in public - well, there's 
often not really any other practical way to do it. Should Professor 
McGonagall have left her entire House, taken Parvarti off somewhere private 
and told her to remove the butterfly? Not really practical, more likely to 
embarass her in fact, I would think - and fairly pointless because when she 
came back sans butterfly, most people would know exactly what had happened.

And, as I've said, my default assumption is that a school that has uniforms 
will have rules on hair - and I've seen no examples that in my view show 
that isn't the case. The only time I've ever seen a reference in the text to 
something that 'surprised' me in terms of hair - something that didn't seem 
completely typical for a school with hair rules - is the reference to Lee's 
dreadlocks. A lot of schools here (though not all) would not regard that as 
acceptable - but I'm also aware that Australia doesn't have the same number 
of people living here of Carribean descent that the UK does, and so it's a 
minor point.

In simple terms, every description of the hair of Hogwarts students I can 
recall seems in line to me, with what is considered acceptable in a wide 
variety of schools I'm aware of that do set standards.

Alla:
> I mean one of the real life rules that Shawn quoted upthread stated
> something about the hair being tied back if they are more than shoulder
> length, I think.

Shaun:

Yes, but that's one schools rule - not necessarily a rule that every school 
that imposes standards has. Hogwarts could still have fairly strict 
standards on hair, even without that rule being in place.

Alla:
> Um, Hermione anyone? She does not bother to do anything with her hair
> before the Ball. And really, that's her choice, not that I am chastising
> her for that. But I would guess that if Hogwarts has any regulations about
> girls' hair, it would be a very obvious example for JKR to let us hear
> McGonagall to tell Hermione to do something about it. She does not and
> IMO that means that students are free to wear whatever hairstyles they 
> like.

Shaun:

Here's what we know about Hermione's hair from the books:

"lots of bushy brown hair." (PS/SS)

"her bushy brown hair flying behind her." (CoS)

"brushing her hair out of her eyes." (PoA)

"One, with very bushy brown hair and rather large front teeth" (GoF)

"But she didn't look like Hermione at all. She had done something with her 
hair; it was no longer bushy but sleek and shiny, and twisted up into an 
elegant knot at the back of her head." (GoF)

"her hair was coming down out of its elegant bun now," (GoF)

"Hermione's hair was bushy again; she confessed to Harry that she had used 
liberal amounts of Sleakeazy's Hair Potion on it for the ball, "but it's way 
too much bother to do every day," (GoF)

""I know things about Ludo Bagman that would make your hair curl... not that 
it needs it -" she added, eyeing Hermione's bushy hair." (GoF)

"I know things about Ludo Bagman that would make your hair curl." (GoF)

"She slowly ran her fingers through her hair." (GoF)

"She ran her fingers through her hair again, and then held her hand up to 
her mouth," (GoF)

"And Viktor pulled a beetle out of my hair after we'd had our conversation 
by the lake." (GoF)

"The door banged open. Hermione came tearing into the room, her cheeks 
flushed and her hair flying." (OotP)

"her bushy hair seemed to crackle with electricity." (OotP)

"her hair was full of bits of twig and leaves." (OotP)

"whose hair was going bushier and bushier in the fumes from her cauldron." 
(HBP)

"One tangled itself in Hermione's hair. (HBP)

"a mane of bushy brown hair whipping out of sight." (HBP)

"long mane of brown hair." (HBP)

(I haven't bothered about DH, because that is after she's left school).

Nothing described above seems to me to be at all unacceptable by the 
standards of most schools hair rules I've seen (except for the twigs and 
leaves). I don't see anything in descriptions of any student's hair that 
seems at odds with that. And I've spent a ridiculous amount of time looking 
for every reference to hair I can find.

Hogwarts does seem to allow girls to have long hair - besides Hermione, Cho, 
Luna, Ginny, Romilda Vane, and Penelope Clearwater, are all described at 
least once as having long hair (Luna and Cho tying it back on occasion). So 
do some Muggle schools, even those which set some rules on hair.

As I say, I see nothing in the text to suggest that they don't impose 
standards - and the fact that I can't see a single case of what most schools 
I know would consider unacceptable (JKR describes people's hair an awful 
lot!) suggests to me that they do, coupled with the fact that that is normal 
for schools for uniforms, and the fact that there is one occasion - the one 
we've been discussing - where a student is pulled up for an inappropriate 
hair ornament.

Alla:
> So, no, if there are no regulations, and Parvati did nothing wrong,
> I do not think McGonagall had any right to do so.

Shaun:

I believe there probably are regulations - but I don't think it can be 
proven absolutely one way or the other.

Alla:
> I understand that she was freaking out, however she IMO was chastising
> Parvati for not comforming to **her** taste and that I find obnoxious
> and wrong.

If Professor McGonagall was ineterested in imposing her own taste on her 
students, they'd all have buns.

"Lavender giggled harder than ever, with her hand pressed hard against her 
mouth to stifle the sound. Harry could see what was funny this time: 
Professor McGonagall, with her hair in a tight bun, looked as though she had 
never let her hair down in any sense." (GoF)

(And by the way - that's a metaphor that would make no sense unless the 
Wizarding World has a concept of acceptable and unacceptable hair for 
different situations - and as all of them went to Hogwarts... where did they 
learn that concept?)

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia 




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 03:09:37 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 03:09:37 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gv2167+jlmi@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv2glh+m9ku@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186693

> Betsy Hp:
> I don't think it's left for the reader, actually.  Certainly a reader *can* go back and reexamine the times Harry may have stumbled, but since the context is never changed (Draco is never recast as a victim in the ferret scene; Harry casting the cruciatus is never written as a moral mistake) I believe they're going against the text when they do so.  I think the reader is expected to just follow along after Harry and adopt his views as their own.  Especially by series end when he has it all figured out.

Carol responds:

Quite possibly it depends on the reader. But even an unsophisticated eleven-year-old kid reading GoF for the second time will see him differently now that he knows that "Moody" is a Death Eater. Older, more sophisticated readers will certainly question any of Moody's actions that seemed okay to them at the time and rethink them in relation to his real motives. (Was he being kind to Neville? Clearly not. Was he really helping Harry? Well, yes, helping him to cheat, but with an ulterior motive. What about those Unforgiveable Curses in class? Notice anything odd about that prolonged Crucio? And what about Draco, then? Was the punishment deserved or was Moody acting cruelly? I think that McGonagall's shocked reaction ("Is that a student?") indicates that he was going overboard (as does "We don't use Transfiguration on students") and if we didn't notice Draco's squeals of pain the first time around, we'll notice them the second. (Harry, however, doesn't have the opportunity to reevaluate the scene.)

Also, surely by this time all but the most unsophisticated reader will have noticed how often Harry is wrong in his judgments. He pitied Quirrell and suspected Snape in SS/PS. He thought (admittedly, with good cause) that Sirius Black was trying to murder him. He thought that "Moody" was just a paranoid Auror trying (despite tournament rules) to help him win the TWT. Many people suspected that he was dead wrong about Snape's being evil long before that point. It was clear that Harry's judgment as to what was happening and whether a person or action was "good" could not altogether be trusted. Call it the unreliable narrator or "the Harry filter"--many readers could see scenes like the bouncing ferret incident much more clearly than Harry could--and certainly much more clearly than Ron, whose judgment tends to be even more immature and unsophisticated than Harry's.

If a reader can't think for him or herself with regard to the ferret incident even on a rereading, even knowing that "Moody" is a DE who thinks nothing of killing his own father or Crucioing a spider with obvious enjoyment in front of the boy whose parents he helped Crucio into insanity, even noting that he dislikes Draco and says so, that reader can refer to a respected adult authority figure, Minerva McGonagall, to determine whether to approve of the punishment or not. (Granted, McG's judgment can also be at fault, as in the Crucio incident!) But here, she indicates clearly that Dumbledore disapproves of Transfiguration as a punishment. And if he disapproves of turning Draco into a ferret, what would he think of *bouncing* him?

And don't forget Hermione, who says, "He could have really hurt Malfoy, though. It was good, really, that Professor McGonagall stopped it" (207). Ron protests at this idea but Harry says nothing. Then we have the Twins and Lee saying, "Moody! How cool is he?" with regard to the day's lesson. And that lesson, we can guess, involves torturing and killing spiders and Imperiusing his own students to demonstrate the Unforgiveable Curses. Not so cool after all, as even an eleven-year-old reader will realize the second time around.  

True, *Harry* doesn't rethink the punishment, but the time has not yet come for him to reassess Draco or for Draco himself to change. We can't expect Harry at fourteen to apply the insights that he will gain from seeing Draco failing to kill Dumbledore in HBP and being forced to Crucio fellow DEs in DH. Harry's judgment of various characters matures at different times. It's too soon for him to see Draco clearly, and by the time he does, he's seen much worse things than Draco the bouncing ferret. (Draco himself has probably forgotten it though, of course, we don't know for sure.

As for Fake!Moody, there's no point in *Harry's* reassessing his actions. Harry knows what he really was, and he's no longer a threat. He has other things to think about, and other lessons to learn.

We, as readers, know as much as Harry does about Barty Jr. at the end of the books. We have the luxury that he doesn't have of going back to reexamine those events from an informed perspective. We also have the advantage of having read the whole series and knowing how very much DD and Snape and others have concealed from Harry and just how unreliable his perspective is, especially in the early books. One of the pleasures of a careful reading is watching his view of individual characters change (and I'm including Luna and Neville and even Dobby along with Snape and Dumbledore). As the series draws to a close, his perspective of those characters becomes clearer and closer to the perspective of a careful reader who examines the textual evidence without "the Harry filter."

There are, no doubt, readers who still approve of the bouncing ferret incident and still think it's funny. But I don't think that's how JKR expects the thoughtful and observant reader to feel.

Carol, who thinks that we *have* to read against the text because we, as readers, know more than Harry does and we can't fully trust his pov or his opinions until the epilogue (and we can choose to disagree with him even then)






From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 03:11:04 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 03:11:04 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <55A866C30DA14E258E439E0A11915521@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gv2go8+liqk@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186694

Alla:
> I mean one of the real life rules that Shawn quoted upthread stated
> something about the hair being tied back if they are more than shoulder
> length, I think.

Shaun:

Yes, but that's one schools rule - not necessarily a rule that every school
that imposes standards has. Hogwarts could still have fairly strict
standards on hair, even without that rule being in place.
<HUGE SNIP>

Alla:

But that's sort of my point Shawn. You seem to be convinced that they have hair regulations because RL schools that you attended had uniforms, which is fair enough. But  there is not one reference in canon about it, so I just do not see what you are basing it besides having RL experience that uniformed schools have hair regulations.

Here is an example which flatly goes against the rule that you quoted and you are saying that it is just one rule and maybe there are still others. Maybe, but where exactly?

Lee has dreadlocks and you seem to acknowledge that most RL schools would not find it acceptable, but you think that there are other regulations. Maybe, but where exactly?

How about this? Which regulations about hair do you think Hogwarts has besides the alleged regulation that girls are not allowed to have ornamental butterflies in their hair? 

I went to school  during Soviet Union times and while Perestroyka already started while I was studying , school system was still operating pretty much as rigidly as it was during soviet times.

We had to wear uniforms ALL THE TIME. I do not remember one regulation about the hair we had to follow, like ever. I mean, I will venture a guess that if I decided to shave my head bold, teachers probably would not like that at all, but otherwise?

I had short hair, long hair, and very long hair, nobody cared as far as I can remember.

What I am trying to say is that you seem to be dismissing that the examples that were given go against the rules that you quoted and that they still may to have regulations.

The reason why I find Hermione's example the strongest one is because to me if the school were to have regulations, I would imagine that the purpose of them will be to have the hair neat and that to me means yes, either putting Hermione's hair in the bum or clasp, or whatever. She does not.

I am very impressed by extensive canon you quoted about her hair and which I snipped, but I do not see that any of those references show that her hair are regulated. IMO of course.

Shaun:
<SNIP>
I believe there probably are regulations - but I don't think it can be
proven absolutely one way or the other. <SNIP>

Alla:

I respect your right to think that there are regulations, but I just do not see any canon for it.





From drednort at alphalink.com.au  Thu May 21 09:15:22 2009
From: drednort at alphalink.com.au (Shaun Hately)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 19:15:22 +1000
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv2go8+liqk@eGroups.com>
References: <gv2go8+liqk@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <7B63599423D4406C82180E49A3EF6800@ShaunPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186695

> Alla:
>
> But that's sort of my point Shawn. You seem to be convinced that
> they have hair regulations because RL schools that you attended
> had uniforms, which is fair enough. But  there is not one reference
> in canon about it, so I just do not see what you are basing it
> besides having RL experience that uniformed schools have hair
> regulations.

Shaun:

Well, first of all, I think there's a very clear reference in canon about 
it. The whole case that we are discussing. Professor McGonnagall tells 
Parvarti to remove the ornamental butterly from her hair.

Have we ever seen Professor McGonagall require a student to do something we 
know to be contrary to the rules of the school? For the life of me, I can't 
think of a single case. But people seem completely willing to decide that 
she suddenly did something like this in the case of Parvarti.

Back in their first year when Snape confiscated 'Quidditch Through The Ages' 
and took points from Gryffindor, stating that it was against the school 
rules for library books to be taken outside, Ron was very quick to say "He 
just made that rule up!". Parvarti, on the other hand, accepts Professor 
McGonnagall's order without question - she doesn't like it, but she does as 
she's told. She doesn't protest that there's no rule. Why would we assume 
that there isn't?

In my view, all the evidence is that Professor McGonagall is a fair teacher 
who follows the rules. Harry describes her as extremely strict but not as 
being unfair.

Secondly, I think the fact that in literally dozens of descriptions of 
students hair that JKR gives us throughout seven books, I can't see a single 
description of a student with any sort of 'extreme' hairstyle. To the best 
of my knowledge and recollection (I'm not going to go through all of those 
again) I can't even recall a reference to a boy having long hair, or to any 
student having hair that isn't of a natural colour, and with the exception 
of Parvarti's butterfly, not a single reference to a girl having anything 
noticeable ornamentation in their hair. If JKR never described hair, this 
wouldn't mean much - but she describes it almost every time she describes a 
student at all.

We have plenty of references to adult males having long hair - just not 
boys. We have references to unusual hair colours in adult women too - but 
not girls.

Harry regards Bill as cool partly because he has a ponytail (and Ginny likes 
it as well) - why out of all the boys whose appearance JKR tells us about at 
Hogwarts, hasn't a single boy got a cool ponytail - especially seeing some 
of the girls seem to like it?

Mrs Weasley wants to trim Bills hair and is concerned at what the bank might 
think about his appearance. Mrs Weasley attacks Harry's hair with a comb 
(and despairs at the fact that it won't lie down) when it is very important 
he makes a good impression at the Ministry for his trial (she also irons his 
best clothes and makes him wash his hair). Good grooming of the hair *does* 
seem to be of some importance in the Wizarding world. I would find it hard 
to believe that in a society where these things are regarded as important 
that the school where the children spend the vast majority of the year 
doesn't consider such matters important enough to regulate.

Alla:
> Here is an example which flatly goes against the rule that you quoted
> and you are saying that it is just one rule and maybe there are still
> others. Maybe, but where exactly?

Shaun:

Plenty of places.

The two cites I gave - St Hilda's and Hurlstone Agricultural High School 
were the second and third references to school thrown up by a google 
(Australia) search for "school uniform" and "hair". The second and third of 
733,000 websites returned by that search. I didn't use the first reference 
simply because I wasn't instantly sure what school it was and I didn't want 
to waste time checking it out when there were schools I know near the top of 
the list.

Do you want me to go through 733,000 websites and examine every single one 
of their uniform rules? I'm sometimes a bit obsessive, but I'm not that 
obsessive.

But here's one more example of a school's uniform rules that concern hair, 
but which don't require it to be tied back if it's long:

"Hairstyles: Hair must be kept in a neat & tidy condition at all times. Girl' - hair may be worn down in a tidy manner or tied back with accessories as 
mentioned below. Boy's - neat collar length hair, no shorter than a No. 2 
cut."

"Hair Accessories: Ribbons, scrunchies, plain hair clips or headbands may be 
worn and must be in our school colours (Dark green / gold)."

(Harvest Christian school - which is about 24th in the list of the 733,000 
websites google returned).

A lot of schools do require long hair to be tied back for safety reasons 
nowadays even if they didn't in the past. But there's still plenty that 
don't.

There are thousands of schools that set rules on hair as part of their 
uniform rules. It's not always the same rules.

Alla:
> Lee has dreadlocks and you seem to acknowledge that most RL schools
> would not find it acceptable, but you think that there are other
> regulations. Maybe, but where exactly?

Shaun:

The only regulation I'm fairly certain Hogwarts has is the only one we've 
seen enforced - that there are limitations on what type of ornamentation 
students can wear in their hair.

Alla:
> How about this? Which regulations about hair do you think Hogwarts
> has besides the alleged regulation that girls are not allowed to
> have ornamental butterflies in their hair?

Shaun:

My guess - Hogwarts regulations for girls hair are most likely similar to 
the ones I just cited above - hair must be neat and tidy, and if it is tied 
back or accessorised, the accesories must be fairly plain.


Alla:
> I went to school  during Soviet Union times and while Perestroyka
> already started while I was studying , school system was still
> operating pretty much as rigidly as it was during soviet times.
>
> We had to wear uniforms ALL THE TIME. I do not remember one
> regulation about the hair we had to follow, like ever. I mean,
> I will venture a guess that if I decided to shave my head bold,
> teachers probably would not like that at all, but otherwise?
>
> I had short hair, long hair, and very long hair, nobody cared
> as far as I can remember.

Shaun:

In some places and in some countries, schools *do* care about their students 
hair. I don't know all that much about education in the Soviet Union as it 
was, nor in Eastern Europe. In all honesty, I don't know all that much about 
education in a lot of countries. But there are two countries where I *do* 
know a lot about their educational history, their educational systems, and 
the way their schools operated.

Australia and the United Kingdom. And both of those two countries are quite 
full of schools that *do* worry about hair, and have been full of schools 
that do worry about hair for quite a long time.

I've just switched over to the British google (www.google.co.uk) and have 
put "school uniform" "hair" into that search engine and asked it to return 
only references from the UK.

First link - Cokethorpe School:

"Hair: Hairstyles are very personal matters and a certain amount of 
individuality is desirable. However, hair must be kept clean, tidy, off the 
face and of reasonable length and style; boys' hair must be above the collar 
and girls' hair must be tied back, up to and including Year 9. Extreme 
bleaches or dyes that are in blatant contrast to the hair's natural colour 
are not permitted. It is at the Headmaster's discretion at all times to 
require a pupil's hairstyle to be modified. All pupils must be clean 
shaven."

The second and third link concern the sales of school uniform specific hair 
accessories - why do schools need school uniform hair accessories? Because 
at many schools they are the only hair accessories permitted.

The fourth link is a British government website discussing the management of 
schools:

"There is no legislation that deals specifically with school uniform or 
other aspects of appearance such as hair colour and style, and the wearing 
of jewellery and make-up, and this is non-statutory guidance. It is for the 
governing body of a school to decide whether there should be a school 
uniform and other rules relating to appearance, and if so what they should 
be. "

Schools have the right to set rules on appearance, including hair.

Fifth link - Bushey Meads School:

""Cult' hairstyles are not allowed. If students come to school with cult 
hairstyles, their parents will be asked to have the hairstyle changed to an 
acceptable style.Until this is done, the student will work in isolation from 
their peers. Please note:  Deciding which hairstyles are 'cult' and which 
are 'acceptable' is the prerogative of the school's Senior Leadership Team."

Sixth link - website of a BBC children's program which discusses news and 
issues of interest to children. A story about an eight year old boy sent 
home from school for having a shaved head in violation of his schools rules.

Why do they have this site? Well, because this is an issue that affects 
millions of children across Britain.

Links seven, eight, and nine - more people selling school uniform hair 
accessories.

Link Ten - Tomlinscote School:

"Hair (Acceptable): Hair should be of one natural colour. It should be 
clean, neat and tidy. Long hair must be tied back in practical lessons. 
Plain colour hair accessories to suit the school uniform. Hair 
(Unacceptable): Extreme hairstyles - for example overly spiked or sculptured 
hair. Shaved areas or razor lines. Obvious steps. Beads, braiding or cornrow 
plaits. Hair must not obscure the face. No fashion accessories."

These are just the first ten links off the web out of 41,400.

I've also grabbed the hairstyle statements from the next ten British schools 
that came up in the search. I'm going to include them at the end of this 
message as a sort of reference just to give an indication of how different 
schools can all have rules on hair, and those rules aren't necessarily going 
to be identical. I won't stick them in here, so people can easily avoid 
them.

Alla:
> What I am trying to say is that you seem to be dismissing that
> the examples that were given go against the rules that you quoted
> and that they still may to have regulations.

Shaun:

No, I'm not doing that at all.

The two examples I previously cited were just intended to show that there 
are schools out there - and not just in totalitarian countries like North 
Korea as one poster had suggested - that do set rules on hair and hair 
accessories as part of school uniform rules. They were not intended to 
suggest that all schools that have rules on hair have the same rules as 
those two schools. There are thousands of schools with rules on hair - and 
the range of rules applied are quite diverse. Some are stricter than others. 
Some only set the most basic rules - clean and tidy. Others restrict 
accessories. Others require long hair to be tied back. There's a huge 
variety of approaches. I think this post might give a better sense of that 
variety, but only by quoting the regulations of about a dozen different 
schools.

It is *normal* for schools in Britain (and in Australia, for that matter) to 
set rules concerning students hairstyles. Not every school bothers, but a 
great many do. I would say that the majority of schools probably do.

While Hogwarts is obviously an unusual school in a lot of ways, for the most 
part it follows a fairly standard model of British school. Most of its 
*non-magical* practices are very similar to those of more typical British 
schools. In my view, it is simply common sense to consider it likely that 
Hogwarts is similar to a normal school - except in cases where we explicitly 
know it isn't.

It is completely normal for a British school to have rules on what girls are 
allowed to wear in their hair. Therefore when we see Professor McGonagall 
reprimanding a student for having something inappropriate in their hair, it 
is completely reasonable to assume she is doing that because Hogwarts has 
such rules. And rather unreasonable to automatically assume that Hogwarts 
doesn't have such rules.

We have references in the text to Hogwarts having *hundreds* of rules. We 
don't know what most of those rules are. But it's reasonable to assume that 
a great many of them are similar to the most common rules in most schools. 
And in British schools with uniforms, one of those is likely to involve 
standards on hair.

Alla:
> The reason why I find Hermione's example the strongest one is because
> to me if the school were to have regulations, I would imagine that the
> purpose of them will be to have the hair neat and that to me means yes,
> either putting Hermione's hair in the bum or clasp, or whatever. She
> does not.

Shaun:

Well, speaking as somebody who is fairly anal retentive about school uniform 
and appearance as a teacher, I can't see any reason why Hermione's hair as 
described would violate uniform rules at *any* school I'm aware of.

Hermione's hair is described as 'bushy'. That's not the same as untidy, not 
by any means.

It is difficult to know what Hermione's hair really looks like - but none of 
the descriptions of it in the text seem to me to describe hair that would be 
unacceptable in even a school that was strict about such matters.

I tried plugging "Hermione Granger" into Google image search to see if I 
could what most people make of Hermione's appearance. Unfortunately nearly 
all depictions are either photos of Emma Watson, or art that has obviously 
been heavily influenced by Emma Watson. But even so, I can't see a single 
image in which Hermione's hair is unacceptable according to the standards 
I've seen in schools.

Alla:

> I am very impressed by extensive canon you quoted about her hair and
> which I snipped, but I do not see that any of those references show
> that her hair are regulated. IMO of course.

Shaun:

They don't, but they weren't intended to. They were intended to show that at 
no point in the books is Hermione's hair described in any way that most 
schools would find unacceptable even if they do have rules. You seem to 
believe Hermione's hair is described in a way that would be unacceptable. 
I'm finding it difficult to see why.

Is Hermione's hair ever described as being unclean (except for the brief 
period it has bits of twigs in it)? Or unkempt? Or even untidy? No. Bushy is 
the most common term used to describe it, and I've never encountered a 
prohibition against bushy hair in any British or Australian school.

That's it for me at the moment - what follows is simply the ten easily found 
references to hair rules at ten British schools I mentioned above, to 
illustrate how schools can have rules on hair, without them all being the 
same rules. If you're not interested in reading that - well, no need to read 
any further in this message.

"Hair must always be tied back using a plain navy hair accessory.  Braided 
hair, hair extensions and inappropriate use of hair dye are not compatible 
with school uniform and not allowed in school."

"Boys' and girls' hair should be clean, neat and tidy and not excessively 
dyed, streaked or shaven and should have no motifs. Hair should not conceal 
eyes or face and facial hair is NOT permitted. Hair accessories should be 
black. Boys' shoulder length hair MUST be tied back"

"Extreme hairstyles are not allowed.  Greases or gels should only be used to 
encourage the hair to flow in a natural way, following the contour of the 
scalp.  They should not be used to cause the hair to be any more prominent 
that would normally be the case.  Hair may be cut short, but should be 
uniform in appearance.  It is not acceptable to have fashionable icons, 
patterns or distinctive layering cut into the hair.  If hair is to be 
coloured the colours chosen should be of a natural colour, and be consistent 
with the rest of the hair colour.  Highlights and extensions should 
similarly be consistent with the rest of the hair style and colour. 
Colouring streaks of hair in a prominent way (eg a different colour to the 
natural colour of the hair) is not allowed.  Equally hair should be tied 
back. Braids, beading, etc should be secured in such a way as to prevent 
possible harm to other students."

"Hair: Clean, neat and tidy, avoiding outrageous or cult styles and obvious 
colourings. No hair extensions or artificial hair are allowed without prior 
permission.Hair jewellery, apart from plain navy or black bands or clasps to 
hold hair back, is not permitted. Religious headwear should be navy or 
black.All long hair must be tied away from the face in all practical 
activities for health and safety reasons."

"Hair style, length and colouring should be suitable for school and such 
that it does not draw particular attention to the individual. Boys hair 
should be no longer than the top of their shirt collar, shaven or part 
shaven styles will not be allowed. Dyed hair will not be allowed. Grade 3 is 
the minimum acceptable length. Girls' hair should be an acceptable style. 
Dyed hair will not be allowed. Elaborately braided, beaded or extended 
styles are not deemed suitable for school. Facial piercings of any type, 
with the exception of girls' earrings, will not be allowed."

"Hair should be clean and in a style acceptable to the ethos of the school. 
It should be of uniformnatural hair colour. Long hair may be tied back. 
Shaven or partly shaven heads will not be acceptable. Hair accessories 
should be discreet and either black or blend with the hair colour."

"HAIRSTYLES should not follow extremes of fashion within the context of the 
school; eg wedges, stepped hair, skinhead cuts, spiked, coloured hair or 
hair extensions.  Hair preparations are not allowed.  All male pupils should 
be clean shaven, and hair should be cut clear of the face and clear of the 
collar at the back.  Girls' hair, if below shoulder length, must be tied 
back at all times."

"Hair must be of a suitable style for School.  For reasons of safety it must 
be clear of the face and, if long, tied back.  Braiding of hair is not 
allowed.  Hair dye is not permitted.  Hair accessories, (ribbons, hair 
bands, etc.) should be navy blue in Winter, white in Summer; or for 
scrunchies, School dress material may be used."

"Hair should always be kept clean and well groomed.  No exaggerated hair 
styles or colours are permitted.  Hair should be off the collar. Hair is 
expected to be neat and of a natural colour.  Boys should not have extremely 
short hair or excessively long hair (below the shirt collar).  Ponytails for 
boys are not allowed."

"Hair should be of a sensible style and colour with no wedges, lines, 
extension braids, etc. Hair should not be dyed.  Too many clips or bobbles 
in girls' hair are not acceptable.  The wearing of hair gel is not suitable 
in school."

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia 




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 11:17:03 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 11:17:03 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <55A866C30DA14E258E439E0A11915521@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gv3d7f+sem2@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186696

> > a_svirn:
> > And Gryffindor colours are red and gold. I can totally see Parvati wearing 
> > an
> > ornamental butterfly in her House colours, which would be considered too 
> > gaudy
> > by St. Hilda's standards. Not that we have any reason to believe that 
> > Hogwats
> > regulations are anywhere near as strict as St: Hilda's: otherwise Luna 
> > would
> > have spent her entire time in Hogwarts in detention. McGonagall in this 
> > scene
> > reprimands Parvati for her taste, which is a personal attack and therefore
> > inappropriate.
> 
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> First of all, just a question - do you have any real life experience of 
> school uniforms? 

a_svirn:
Actually yes, I do. The school I used to attend until I was fourteen was like that. We had to wear uniforms, and yes, hair bands' and bows colour was regulated ? brown for everyday wear and white for formal occasions. However, shape and style where up to us, and as for the stuff like hairpins, clips clasps etc. they were definitely not regulated. Not even as far as the colour was concerned. We had teachers like McGonagall or Snape who would scold students publicly for the state of their nails or less than pristine handkerchiefs, but even they would see nothing untoward in butterfly-shaped clips. Which is why I never in my life wore bands and always wore hairpins or hairclips. And I never once got in trouble because of it. 


> a_svirn:
> > Yes, that would be bad form indeed. But we don't know if Neville noticed
> > that his list had gone missing, and McGonagall did not bother to find out.
> >  As for not taking the proper care of it, I'd say that leaving it in the
> > dormitory was actually pretty sensible. He had no reason to suspect his
> > house-mates, did he? And knowing his propensity for loosing things he
> > didn't trust himself enough to carry it on his person.
> 
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Actually we do know that Neville noticed that his list had gone missing. The 
> text tells us he did - on Thursday evening as Harry returns to the Tower 
> after
> 
> having his Firebolt returned, Neville is pleading with Sir Cadogan to let 
> him in without the password because he has lost his list - he doesn't know 
> where
> 
> it's gone. He doesn't know what he's done with it. It's not until over two 
> days after this that Professor McGonagall finds out that he made the list 
> and lost
> 
> it - so he knew it had happened.

a_svirn:
You are right, my bad. However Neville in this scene doesn't know for sure if he's lost it. He might be hoping to find it in the dormitory. He might still be hoping to find it two days after. 


> a_svirn:
> > You didn't address in your response the other side of the issue, though.
> > How about the fact that McGonagall's own arrangements put Neville in the
> > loose-loose situation, and when he predictably enough lost, he was the
> > only one who was punished? Didn't McGonagall as a responsible adult bear
> > a greater responsibility for what had occurred?
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> I didn't address that point because I'm not sure why you think McGonagall's 
> arrangements are at fault here. <snip> 


> You have to find a balance between giving kids the chance to learn 
> responsibility, and not putting too much on them. I don't believe the 
> expectations being
> 
> placed on Neville in this case are unreasonable.
> 
> In a sense, the list of passwords to Gryffindor Tower could be viewed as 
> being equivalent to a house key. Losing them could be considered equivalent 
> to
> 
> losing your front door key.
> 
> Is it reasonable to expect a 13 year old boy to have a house key given that 
> it's a normal expectation that he will be passing through that door on a 
> regular
> 
> basis? I believe it is. Is it reasonable to expect a 13 year old boy to take 
> good care of that house key to the extent that even if he forgets to carry 
> it
> 
> occasionally, he has least some idea where he last left it? I believe it is. 


a_svirn:
So do I. However, "normal" is an operative word here. You yourself diagnosed Neville with learning disability. That would make him not quite as normal as the rest of Gryffindors. Is it reasonable to expect a boy with extremely bad memory not to misplace a key when he misplaces everything else? I am not sure. But this situation is even worse than that. Sir Cadogan's passwords are described as "ridiculously complicated" and he moreover "changed them at least twice a day". Even if it is reasonable to expect a thirteen year old boy with notoriously bad memory not to loose his key, it would be absolutely unreasonable to expect him to memorise complicated code combinations which are changed at least twice a day. 



> Shaun:
> And I believe it is even if that boy does have memory issues. That might 
> make the second of those two expectations somewhat more difficult for him, 
> but it
> 
> shouldn't impact the first or the third to any significant degree.
> 
> And in a sense, it's even more important you do this with kids who have 
> learning difficulties. If you allow a child's learning difficulties to stop 
> you
> 
> letting them do things they should be capable of, then you're not doing the 
> child a service. You're actually doing them a great disservice. There are 
> limits
> 
> - no child with a learning difficulty should ever be knowingly be placed in 
> a situation which their LD actually prevents them from doing.

a_svirn:
Which exactly what happened with Neville. 



> a_svirn:
> > I wasn't discussing teachers' rights (though I don't believe they
> > are equal to those of parents); I was merely saying that McGonagall's
> > behaviour in this scene is petty. Parents can be petty too. I'd say
> > ridiculing a teenage daughter's taste in jewellery is not the best
> > strategy to improve it.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Here we get into a really esoteric area - the legal basis of teaching. You 
> may not agree that teachers' rights are equal to those of parents (and I 
> absolutely believe that they shouldn't be) but unfortunately, perhaps for 
> both of us, it's a long held principle of British common law that they are. 
> The doctrine of 'in loco parentis' goes back literally to the middle ages 
> and all indications are still very strong that it applies at Hogwarts (the 
> only time we ever see a permission slip required of students is when they 
> are going to be allowed to leave the grounds of the school to go into 
> Hogsmeade, in other words, when they might arguably be stepping outside the 
> authority of the school.

a_svirn:
Yes, Hogwarts attitude towards the rights of parents does seem somewhat medieval, especially when it comes to muggle parents.  






From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 11:23:44 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 11:23:44 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <7B63599423D4406C82180E49A3EF6800@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gv3dk0+4ej8@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186697

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Shaun Hately" <drednort at ...> wrote:
>
> > Alla:
> >
> > But that's sort of my point Shawn. You seem to be convinced that
> > they have hair regulations because RL schools that you attended
> > had uniforms, which is fair enough. But  there is not one reference
> > in canon about it, so I just do not see what you are basing it
> > besides having RL experience that uniformed schools have hair
> > regulations.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Well, first of all, I think there's a very clear reference in canon about 
> it. The whole case that we are discussing. Professor McGonnagall tells 
> Parvarti to remove the ornamental butterly from her hair.
> 
> Have we ever seen Professor McGonagall require a student to do something we 
> know to be contrary to the rules of the school? For the life of me, I can't 
> think of a single case. 

a_svirn:
Yes, we have ? when she made Harry a seeker in his first year. And that's a far more important rule than appropriateness of large ornamental butterflies.  







From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 11:36:20 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 11:36:20 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments and hair
In-Reply-To: <7B63599423D4406C82180E49A3EF6800@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gv3ebk+pai5@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186698

Shaun:

Well, first of all, I think there's a very clear reference in canon about
it. The whole case that we are discussing. Professor McGonnagall tells
Parvarti to remove the ornamental butterly from her hair.

Alla:

Well, sure there is a case of canon which we interpret differently ? you argue that this is the reference to the school having regulations about the hairstyles and I am saying that this is professor McGonagall attacking student's taste. I was asking for the additional canon evidence.

Shaun:
<SNIP>
Back in their first year when Snape confiscated 'Quidditch Through The Ages'
and took points from Gryffindor, stating that it was against the school
rules for library books to be taken outside, Ron was very quick to say "He
just made that rule up!". Parvarti, on the other hand, accepts Professor
McGonnagall's order without question - she doesn't like it, but she does as
she's told. She doesn't protest that there's no rule. Why would we assume
that there isn't?<SNIP>

Alla:

This is a very good example, one of those which is very high on my Snape as sadist list by the way. So, how does Ron saying that helped Harry? Ron did not say it to Snape's face, didn't he? I completely agreed with him simply because to me having a rule when student is  reading a book outside enjoying weather with his friends is absurd, it makes no sense. I would imagine teachers encouraging the boys to read. But many people still said that oh no, Ron does not know, of course there is such a rule. As to why Parvati would not protest, even if there is no such rule to me the answer is very simple ? she would not want to get harsher punishment. Same way as fifty points for the House became fifty points each when somebody opened their mouth. Of course we do not know if it was supposed to be fifty points for the house, but in my opinion it was.

Shaun:
<SNIP>
In my view, all the evidence is that Professor McGonagall is a fair teacher
who follows the rules. Harry describes her as extremely strict but not as
being unfair <SNIP>

Alla:

I agree that McGonagall is often fair and I agree that she is **always** fair and favorable to Harry, which I do not mind in the slightest. But I think she has her lapses too.

Shaun:
<SNIP>
Secondly, I think the fact that in literally dozens of descriptions of
students hair that JKR gives us throughout seven books, I can't see a single
description of a student with any sort of 'extreme' hairstyle. To the best
of my knowledge and recollection (I'm not going to go through all of those
again) I can't even recall a reference to a boy having long hair, 
 <SNIP>

Alla:
"His hair was lank and greasy and was flopping onto the table, his hooked nose barely half an inch from the surface of the parchment as he scribbled" - p.641, OOP

"He was very good-looking; his dark hair fell into his eyes with a sort of casual elegance neither Kames, nor Harry could ever have achieved" - p.642, OOP

I think hair flopping onto the table means that it was long enough, I cannot be hundred percent sure of course that Sirius' hair are that long however his hair certainly goes against another rule that you quoted ? it is in his face and nobody is saying anything.

Alla:
> Here is an example which flatly goes against the rule that you quoted
> and you are saying that it is just one rule and maybe there are still
> others. Maybe, but where exactly?

Shaun:

Plenty of places. <HUGE SNIP>

Alla:

Sorry, I meant in canon.

Shaun:

The only regulation I'm fairly certain Hogwarts has is the only one we've
seen enforced - that there are limitations on what type of ornamentation
students can wear in their hair.

Alla:

So the one she is scolding her about is the only regulation they have?

I have to agree to disagree then.

Alla





From hagrid_hut at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 12:07:21 2009
From: hagrid_hut at yahoo.com (hagrid_hut)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 12:07:21 -0000
Subject: How important is Hagrid?
Message-ID: <gv3g5p+diki@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186699

Hagrid81 (http://teawithhagrid.blogspot.com):

Hello everyone!  I've been reading on and off for a few weeks now and thought it be best to just start a new post rather than risk redundancy in another.

First let me tell you all that I am obsessed with the character Hagrid--not just because he's so loveable, but also because I find that he plays so many different roles in the series: protector, comic relief, tongue-slipper, etc.  He's a hard character to place because he serves so many functions in the story, but none to a degree that it makes the reader feel as if the story couldn't go on without him (like a Dumbledore does).

So my question is: Where would you all rank Hagrid in order of importance?

I hope this is not redundant either.




From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Thu May 21 14:23:11 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 14:23:11 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <55A866C30DA14E258E439E0A11915521@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gv3o4f+2gm8@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186700

> Shaun:
 
> ornament on a formal occasion.
> 
> As for Luna - some people seem to be under the impression that Luna is 
> always wearing something odd. Reading through the books, I don't think that 
> is the
> 
> case. We are told she is wearing her radish earrings (actually they are 
> dirgible plums, IIRC) on precisely one occasion that I can find. We are told 
> that she
> 
> is wearing a butterbeer cork necklace on only one occasion that I can find. 
> We are told she is wearing a set of Spectrespecs on only one occasion I can 
> find.

Magpie:
Nobody said she was always wearing something odd, we said that she was obviously allowed to wear little ornaments like her necklace and earrings--which are no more elaborate than Parvati wearing a hairclip.

You seem to be interpreting the scene by saying that if McGonagall told Parvati to take out her hair clip therefore there must be a rule against them that McGonagall is just following objectively. I see the scene as showing McGonagall's personal aversion. The hair regulations at whatever schools you have studied are not canon, and as two people have pointed out, there are of course examples of schools with strict uniform codes, even concerning hair, that allow butterfly clips.

Shaun: 
> And that's it. There's no real reason I can find to suppose that Luna 
> constantly goes around wearing odd things. She does so sometimes, but on 
> none of the
> 
> three occasions that are mentioned is it an unusually formal school 
> occasion, as it on the occasion we see Parvarti reprimanded. I'd also point 
> out that

Magpie:
I don't see why the fact that she doesn't always get described as wearing odd things negates what anybody's said. Luna's shown casually wearing ornamentation in class that's no less elaborate than a hair pin shaped like a butterfly so why would we think that was against the rules? We know it's not a formal school occasion. It's a reason for us to see that at least in everyday wear, this is fine. Hermione's bushy hair is also fine even on a formal occasion.

My point in reading the scene has nothing to do with rules at Hogwarts or other boarding schools. I'm just talking about how McGonagall is characterized. You say that you can't remember her ever breaking the rules. She is shown letting her personal desires to interfere with the rules, most blatantly when she swoops in after watching Harry flying around against the rules in his first flying lesson and instead of giving him detention she eagerly breaks another rule to get him on her Quidditch team. And lets him have a broom as a first year. One of the first times we get to know McGonagall we see her putting her desire to win at Quidditch above the rules even if it's unfair to other first years. 

I think she's consistently shown as more like Hermione--she in general thinks rules should be followed, but will break them when something more important to her comes up (whether something ethical like standing against Umbridge or something personal). More importantly for this discussion, which was originally about the feelings she's acting on, she has been known to let her emotions effect how she's punishing people. She makes personal remarks about Neville. She's angry and afraid about someone getting into the Tower and gives him a particularly humiliating punishment in response to it, not really caring if the constantly changing passwords probably insured that Neville wasn't even the only person writing them down. 

And in the scene with Parvati, she snaps about her having a "ridiculous" thing in her hair when she's nervously awaiting teachers with whom she has a rivalry (just as she has a rivalry in Quidditch). She doesn't tell her to take out the clip because it's not regulation, she snaps that it's ridiculous-looking as well. I took from the scene that she's annoyed that a girl is wearing a clip that indicates she's not a serious student but a girl hoping a boy from another school will notice her. That will make her school look bad. But whether or not she's got an actual rule here that she's enforcing (which she doesn't say she does), her insult is showing her emotions about it, imo. She's not saying the clip's not regulation so take it out: "Patil, you know no hair ornaments are allowed with dress uniforms" or even just "Patil, remove that hair clip." She's irritated by the sight of the clip and so tells Parvati it looks ridiculous. That doesn't read to me like McGonagall's following some textbook teaching method. It just seems like one of the many instances where we see what McGonagall is feeling and how she feels about the student by the way she deals with the student in front of her. It seems like the students pick up on this early on.

-m




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 16:25:38 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 16:25:38 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv3dk0+4ej8@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv3va2+husb@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186701

Shaun:
> > 
> > Well, first of all, I think there's a very clear reference in canon about it. The whole case that we are discussing. Professor McGonnagall tells Parvarti to remove the ornamental butterly from her hair.
> > 
> > Have we ever seen Professor McGonagall require a student to do something we 
> > know to be contrary to the rules of the school? For the life of me, I can't 
> > think of a single case. 
> 
> a_svirn:
> Yes, we have ? when she made Harry a seeker in his first year. And that's a far more important rule than appropriateness of large ornamental butterflies.
>
Carol responds:
Not to mention that she actually buys him a broom (the best then available) to help him win.

Now I happen to think that ordering Parvati to remove the butterfly from her hair was no big deal (McGonagall is always strict and seldom concerned with how her students feel about it, and it's not as if she docked points or gave Parvati a detention.) But I'm not at all sure that she's enforcing a rule here. She's concerned, instead, with the impression that students in her House will make on the staff and students of the visiting schools, especially Durmstrang, as her ordering Neville not to reveal that he can't perform "a simple switching Spell" indicates.

As for students with unusual hairstyles, Lee Jordan's dreadlocks have already been cited. Young Severus Snape, at the time he was attending Hogwarts and had McGonagall for Transfiguration (though admittedly she was not his HoH) had hair long enough to drag on his DADA OWL exam as he wrote. But the best example is probably Angelina Johnson (who normally wears her hair in long plaits like Parvati and a number or other girls) being taunted by Pansy Parkinson during Quidditch practice:

"Hey, Johnson, what's with that hairstyle, anyway? Why would anyone want to look like they've got worms coming out of their head?" (OoP chapter 14).

Evidently, Hogwarts has no rules regarding hairstyles (or unnatural hair color--Tonks would have been in violation of the rules for her whole seven years!). McGonagall is just being acutely conscious of the impression that the students, particularly the Gryffindors, will create upon the visitors. With reference to the Yule Ball, which she refers to as "a chance for us all to--er--let our hair down," she adds sternly, "But that does NOT mean that we will be relaxing the standards of behavior we expect from Hogwarts students. I will be most seriously displeased if a Gryffindor student embarrasses the school in any way" (GoF chapter 21).

She's concerned with decorum, or the appearance of it, whether or not a school rule is specifically involved. Or call it school pride or House pride. It's all about looking good in front of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons. At least that's what the evidence within the book itself indicates.

Carol, pretty sure that McG simply did not want a student from her House to look "ridiculous" and that no school rule was being violated




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 17:11:27 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 17:11:27 -0000
Subject: How important is Hagrid?
In-Reply-To: <gv3g5p+diki@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv41vv+ijhk@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186702

"hagrid_hut" wrote:
>
> Hello everyone!  I've been reading on and off for a few weeks now and thought it be best to just start a new post rather than risk redundancy in another.
> 
> First let me tell you all that I am obsessed with the character Hagrid--not just because he's so loveable, but also because I find that he plays so many different roles in the series: protector, comic relief, tongue-slipper, etc.  He's a hard character to place because he serves so many functions in the story, but none to a degree that it makes the reader feel as if the story couldn't go on without him (like a Dumbledore does).
> 
> So my question is: Where would you all rank Hagrid in order of importance?
> 
> I hope this is not redundant either.
>
Carol responds:
Hello, Hagrid-hut! (I hope that's what you want us to call you.) Interesting first post--and, no, your question isn't redundant--and we can certainly use a new thread!

I don't want to give Hagrid a numbered rank, which would be extremely difficult to defend and purely subjective, but IMO  he's less important than the primary characters: Harry, Hermione, Ron, Dumbledore, and Snape (whom I'm not listing in any particular order except for Harry). I don't think we can say, for example, that there would be no story without Hagrid or that Harry would not have survived without his help. (Voldemort should also be on my list of primary characters, disappointing though I sometimes find him, since there would be no story without him and because the scar link and soul bit are crucial to the main plot.)

I'd place Hagrid within the ranks of important secondary characters like Draco and his parents, Sirius Black, Lupin, Dobby, and Wormtail, all of whom at some point perform actions that are important to the plot of a particular book without necessarily being central to the series as a whole. He's probably more important than McGonagall and certainly more important than Seamus or Lee Jordan or Charlie Weasley or Fleur.

Hagrid (like Snape, of all people) exemplifies JKR's gift for creating memorable and highly individual characters. He's unique among the staff members in being Harry's personal friend (unless you want to classify Dumbledore as a friend rather than a mentor) and, outside of class, his social equal. (I can't imagine Harry or Hermione pounding on any other teacher's door and ordering them to open up.)

He's also nearly our first clue (along with a cat transforming into a woman and a man dressed like Merlin magically sucking out the light from the streetlights) that the world of Harry Potter is different from the "Muggle" world in which the Dursleys live. In that respect, he's part of the setting, in addition to being a plot device and providing comic relief. He's the first not fully human character with whom Harry forms a personal relationship, introducing us to the theme of prejudice by Wizards against their fellow magical beings (though I hope I'll be forgiven for saying that it really is unwise for a Wizard to marry a Giant and that, in general, Giants should be given a wide berth.)

At any rate, certainly the books wouldn't be the same without Hagrid--no magical motorcycle lent or given him by "young Sirius Black," no hippogriffs, no Blast-Ended Skrewts, no after-hour excursions under the Invisibility Cloak to help Hagrid cope with his current problem, no accidentally revealed information that turns out to be important. No Grawp or Aragog (no loss!).

I don't share your fascination with Hagrid, but I understand it. I felt (and feel) the same way about Snape.

Carol, noting that everything in this post is just my opinion, even the "certainly" remark!






From zanooda2 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 18:56:45 2009
From: zanooda2 at yahoo.com (zanooda2)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 18:56:45 -0000
Subject: Neville's punishment
In-Reply-To: <guu951+9htt@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv485d+o2r6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186703

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "randmath23" <randmath23 at ...> wrote:

> I was wondering, who has the authority concerning the 
> passwords to get into the common rooms?  


zanooda:

I'm not sure I understood your question correctly, but it was the Pink Lady herself who invented the passwords, and so did Sir Cadogan after replacing her. "Sir Cadogan spent half his time challenging people to duels, and the rest thinking up ridiculously complicated passwords, which he changed at least twice a day"(p.167 Am.ed.). Poor Neville :-)! Sorry if it's not what you were asking about :-).




From beatrice23 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 20:48:53 2009
From: beatrice23 at yahoo.com (Beatrice23)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 20:48:53 -0000
Subject: Neville's punishment
In-Reply-To: <gv485d+o2r6@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv4enl+c0ii@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186704

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "zanooda2" <zanooda2 at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "randmath23" <randmath23@> wrote:
> 
> > I was wondering, who has the authority concerning the 
> > passwords to get into the common rooms?  
> 
> 
> zanooda:
> 
> I'm not sure I understood your question correctly, but it was the Pink Lady herself who invented the passwords, and so did Sir Cadogan after replacing her. "Sir Cadogan spent half his time challenging people to duels, and the rest thinking up ridiculously complicated passwords, which he changed at least twice a day"(p.167 Am.ed.). Poor Neville :-)! Sorry if it's not what you were asking about :-).
>

Beatrice:

If I could chime in here as well...I believe that the passwords are given to the students from portrait (or statue) to the Prefects who then desseminate them to the students in their respective houses.  (See OotP when Harry leaves the feast early only to realize that he hasn't heard the password yet.)  I suspect that in OotP that Hermione might have suggested a password that would be easy for Neville as a kindness.





From beatrice23 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 20:55:50 2009
From: beatrice23 at yahoo.com (Beatrice23)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 20:55:50 -0000
Subject: Concerning Apparating
In-Reply-To: <guo0t3+8t7l@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv4f4m+q75d@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186705

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "LunaRaven" <daughter_of_morgoth at ...> wrote:
>
> I'm a new member to this group, and I only joined it to address a
> subject cited in the HPfGU FAQ. I'm not an adult yet, or I suppose a
> "grown-up"(though I suppose that depends on how you define a person that
> has "grown-up"), but I think that I can provide some insight into the
> topic. I think allot of problems adults encounter when reading Young
> Adult fiction, specifically Young Adult Fantasy, is the problem of
> attempting to make "adult" sense of something not initially written for
> adults. From the FAQ I quote,
*Snip*

Beatrice:

Welcome to the group!  I haven't posted here myself for a while.  But I read your post and wanted to welcome you.  I don't have much to add as Steve pretty much covered it all.  

I did want to say that your post was nicely written and you had an interesting argument.  




From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 21:59:48 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 21:59:48 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv3o4f+2gm8@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv4isk+2s4p@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186706

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "sistermagpie" <sistermagpie at ...> wrote:
>
> > Shaun:
>  
> > ornament on a formal occasion.
> > 
> > As for Luna - some people seem to be under the impression that Luna is 
> > always wearing something odd. Reading through the books, I don't think that 
> > is the
> > 
> > case. We are told she is wearing her radish earrings (actually they are 
> > dirgible plums, IIRC) on precisely one occasion that I can find. We are told 
> > that she
> > 
> > is wearing a butterbeer cork necklace on only one occasion that I can find. 
> > We are told she is wearing a set of Spectrespecs on only one occasion I can 
> > find.
> 
> Magpie:
> Nobody said she was always wearing something odd, we said that she was obviously allowed to wear little ornaments like her necklace and earrings--which are no more elaborate than Parvati wearing a hairclip.
> 
> You seem to be interpreting the scene by saying that if McGonagall told Parvati to take out her hair clip therefore there must be a rule against them that McGonagall is just following objectively. I see the scene as showing McGonagall's personal aversion. The hair regulations at whatever schools you have studied are not canon, and as two people have pointed out, there are of course examples of schools with strict uniform codes, even concerning hair, that allow butterfly clips.
> 

jkoney:
I also saw the scene the same way that Shaun did. I also went to 12 years of school with a dress code and there were rules for hair and what you could or could not wear in your hair or on your body.

When I read the scene I think that the hairclip itself is ridiculous in some way. Not the fact that it is a hairclip but the design, coloring, or something else makes it ridiculous based upon school rules.

Yes, even at my school you could push the dress code and the teachers may not have cared all of the time, but when there was an event especially where visitors would be there you had to follow the letter of the rule.



> Shaun: 
> > And that's it. There's no real reason I can find to suppose that Luna 
> > constantly goes around wearing odd things. She does so sometimes, but on 
> > none of the
> > 
> > three occasions that are mentioned is it an unusually formal school 
> > occasion, as it on the occasion we see Parvarti reprimanded. I'd also point 
> > out that
> 
> Magpie:
> snip>
> 
> My point in reading the scene has nothing to do with rules at Hogwarts or other boarding schools. I'm just talking about how McGonagall is characterized. You say that you can't remember her ever breaking the rules. She is shown letting her personal desires to interfere with the rules, most blatantly when she swoops in after watching Harry flying around against the rules in his first flying lesson and instead of giving him detention she eagerly breaks another rule to get him on her Quidditch team. And lets him have a broom as a first year. One of the first times we get to know McGonagall we see her putting her desire to win at Quidditch above the rules even if it's unfair to other first years. 

jkoney:
As far as we know there are no rules against a first year being on the quidditch team. There is a rule against first years bringing brooms. With no broom, I doubt very many first years tried out for the team.

While we don't know for sure, it would be logical to assume that if a first year made the quidditch team they would be allowed to have their own broom as an exception to the no first years with a broom rule.

> Magpie:

> I think she's consistently shown as more like Hermione--she in general thinks rules should be followed, but will break them when something more important to her comes up (whether something ethical like standing against Umbridge or something personal). More importantly for this discussion, which was originally about the feelings she's acting on, she has been known to let her emotions effect how she's punishing people. She makes personal remarks about Neville. She's angry and afraid about someone getting into the Tower and gives him a particularly humiliating punishment in response to it, not really caring if the constantly changing passwords probably insured that Neville wasn't even the only person writing them down. 
> 

jkoney:
Her remarks to Neville while harsh are grounded in the fact that someone had already got in to the tower and the list was from Neville. 

Don't write down the passwords is a very direct instruction. Neville disobeyed the instruction. The why he wrote it down isn't as important as the fact that a supposed mass murderer got into a dorm full of children.






From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Thu May 21 22:06:40 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 22:06:40 -0000
Subject: How important is Hagrid?
In-Reply-To: <gv3g5p+diki@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv4j9g+6k57@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186707

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "hagrid_hut" <hagrid_hut at ...> wrote:
>
> Hagrid81 (http://teawithhagrid.blogspot.com):
> 
> Hello everyone!  I've been reading on and off for a few weeks now and thought it be best to just start a new post rather than risk redundancy in another.
> 
> First let me tell you all that I am obsessed with the character Hagrid--not just because he's so loveable, but also because I find that he plays so many different roles in the series: protector, comic relief, tongue-slipper, etc.  He's a hard character to place because he serves so many functions in the story, but none to a degree that it makes the reader feel as if the story couldn't go on without him (like a Dumbledore does).
> 
> So my question is: Where would you all rank Hagrid in order of importance?
> 
> I hope this is not redundant either.

jkoney:
Hagrid is one of my favorite characters in the book. His innocence and gentleness could have been turned into an over the top stereotypical character. 

I have him as an important secondary character. He is Harry's first friend in the wizarding world and most importantly he is the first person that Harry sees stand up for him. He gives Harry his own birthday cake and buys him his first real present that he can remember. He is almost like a big brother.

He is also the one who carries him out of the house at Godrics hollow and also carries him out of the forest at the end of DH.







From no.limberger at gmail.com  Fri May 22 01:06:02 2009
From: no.limberger at gmail.com (No Limberger)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 18:06:02 -0700
Subject: [HPforGrownups] How important is Hagrid?
In-Reply-To: <gv3g5p+diki@eGroups.com>
References: <gv3g5p+diki@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <7ef72f90905211806wfb43c7bp514c923f940449fb@mail.gmail.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186708

>Hargrid81 wrote:
>First let me tell you all that I am obsessed with the
>character Hagrid--not just because he's so loveable,
>but also because I find that he plays so many different
>roles in the series: protector, comic relief,
>tongue-slipper, etc. He's a hard character to place
>because he serves so many functions in the story,
>but none to a degree that it makes the reader feel
>as if the story couldn't go on without him (like a
>Dumbledore does).

>So my question is: Where would you all rank Hagrid in
>order of importance?

No.Limberger responds:
Hagrid is a very interesting character.  I agree that
he is very lovable and is certainly a very popular
character.  He could also be viewed as one of
Voldemort's first victims as it was Voldemort who
framed Hagrid for opening the Chamber of Secrets
and killing Myrtle. It was this false accusation
that caused Hagrid to be suspended from Hogwarts
and not be allowed to use magic for most of his life.
He is, after all, at the time when Harry is 11 years
old already in his 60's as the event had occurred
50 years earlier.  Thus, we see a man who lives
within the WW, has magical powers, but is not
permitted to use them thanks to Voldemort.  He
clearly loves animals and may prefer their company
over human company since many in the WW may
not want to associate with him, save Albus
Dumbledore, who permits Hagrid to work at Hogwarts
as a caretaker in spite of objections.  He becomes
very protective of the young Harry knowing full well
who attempted to kill him and did kill his parents.
Hagrid is humble, shy, protective, caring and
determined to help stop Voldemort.  Thus, imo,
he is an ally not only of Dumbledore, but of Harry
and anyone else fighting for good.

-- 
"Why don't you dance with me, I'm not no limberger!"


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]




From drednort at alphalink.com.au  Fri May 22 07:48:37 2009
From: drednort at alphalink.com.au (Shaun Hately)
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 17:48:37 +1000
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv4isk+2s4p@eGroups.com>
References: <gv4isk+2s4p@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <CD948EC790994780AFFDF94BF9A2BC84@ShaunPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186709

a_svirn:

> Actually yes, I do. The school I used to attend until I was fourteen was
> like that. We had to wear uniforms, and yes, hair bands' and bows colour
> was regulated - brown for everyday wear and white for formal occasions.
> However, shape and style where up to us, and as for the stuff like
> hairpins, clips clasps etc. they were definitely not regulated. Not
> even as far as the colour was concerned. We had teachers like McGonagall
> or Snape who would scold students publicly for the state of their nails
> or less than pristine handkerchiefs, but even they would see nothing
> untoward in butterfly-shaped clips. Which is why I never in my life
> wore bands and always wore hairpins or hairclips. And I never once got
> in trouble because of it.

Shaun:

Sure - so that's how your school worked. It's not how all schools worked. 
Your school didn't care about hairpins, clips, and clasps. Nothing wrong 
with that. But the thing is, quite a few schools do.

I've now cited the hair regulations for approximately 15 different schools. 
Just briefly, I'm going to quote a few relevant sections from those:

"Ribbons, scrunchies, plain hair clips or headbands may be worn and must be 
in our school colours (Dark green / gold)."

Note - 'plain hair clips'.

"Plain colour hair accessories to suit the school uniform... No fashion 
accessories."

"Hair must always be tied back using a plain navy hair accessory."

"Hair accessories should be black."

"Hair jewellery, apart from plain navy or black bands or clasps to hold hair 
back, is not permitted."

"Hair accessories should be discreet and either black or blend with the hair 
colour."

"Hair accessories, (ribbons, hair bands, etc.) should be navy blue in 
Winter, white in Summer; or for scrunchies, School dress material may be 
used."

These are real regulations from real schools. Not all schools, but these are 
a range of fairly typical schools. Your school didn't bother with this type 
of regulation - that's fine. But plenty of schools do.

And the fact that Professor McGonagall chooses to reprimand a student on a 
formal occasion for having something inappropriate in her hair, suggests 
that Hogwarts does have such rules. Does it prove it? No, it doesn't. But if 
people are going to base a case for attacking a teacher as having done 
something inappropriate, then in my view the burden of evidence should be on 
them to prove it wasn't something the teacher was allowed to do under the 
school rules - people seem to be making an assumption that such a rule could 
not possibly exists, and therefore it must have been inappropriate. To me, 
it seems quite a long stretch to assume Hogwarts doesn't have a rule that is 
quite typical of uniformed schools.

And when I see people claiming that such rules would only exist in 
totalitarian societies like North Korea and that only teachers like Umbridge 
would bother regulating such matters as hair clips - well, I know from 
experience and from research that that simply is not the case. Plenty of 
schools *do* regulate these things. If people are basing their opinion of 
what McGonagall would and wouldn't do on what they believe to be normal 
practices in schools in non-totalitarian regimes, then personally I would 
expect them to modify their position somewhat, when it's clearly 
demonstrated that entirely normal schools in Britain and some other Western 
democracies do, in fact, regulate such matters.

I can certainly understand a person thinking their own school experiences 
are fairly typical of what goes on in schools and what is normally expected 
in a school, and what can reasonably be expected to be part of a school's 
rules. Nothing wrong with that at all. In fact, it's perfectly normal.

The point I would make here though is that there are at least hundreds of 
schools - if not thousands and millions of children in Britain who attend 
schools that *do* regulate what kids are allowed to have in their hair - and 
it is *just* as valid for those students to think that the normal 
'non-magic-related' rules of Hogwarts are going to be similar to the rules 
at their school.

It's every bit as valid for somebody to believe that Hogwarts does regulate 
such matters as hair clips because lots of schools do, as it is for somebody 
to believe that Hogwarts does not regulate such matters as hair clips 
because lots of schools don't.

Thousands of children will have read that passage and probably just assumed 
that Professor McGonagall is imposing a school rule - because many schools 
have that kind of rule.

We're not being expected to assume that Hogwarts has an unusual school rule 
to assume that Professor McGonagall is doing something she's perfectly 
correct to do. If such rules were only found in totalitarian regimes like 
North Korea, then, yes, it would be fairly odd to ask anybody to assume 
without incontrovertible evidence that Hogwarts has such a rule. But given 
that this is not a rule found only in totalitarian regimes like North Korea, 
but is in fact a rule found in modern schools all over Britain, I think it 
becomes odd to assume that Hogwarts wouldn't have such a rule without 
incontrovertible evidence that it does.

The position that Professor McGonagall is doing something inappropriate in 
this case is founded upon an assumption that she could not possibly be 
enforcing a rule. The position that she might be acting entirely 
appropriately on the other hand is merely founded upon an assumption that 
maybe Hogwarts has a rule that is quite typical and exists in many schools.

This isn't a criminal trial, but in law, a person is considered innocent 
unless proven guilty. The burden of proof lies with those who wish to prove 
somebody did the wrong thing, not with those who would defend their actions.

To claim that Professor McGonagall did the wrong thing in this case, I think 
it's need to be proven that no such rule could possibly exist at Hogwarts. 
In the absence of such proof, I believe a teacher deserves the benefit of 
the doubt.

a_svirn:
> You are right, my bad. However Neville in this scene doesn't know
> for sure if he's lost it. He might be hoping to find it in the
> dormitory. He might still be hoping to find it two days after.

Shaun:

I could understand Neville not immediately reporting the loss of the 
passwords. It's not unreasonable for him to want to look for them first. But 
two days is way too long. There's a mass murderer on the loose who has 
already tried to get into the Tower once.

a_svirn:
> So do I. However, "normal" is an operative word here. You yourself
> diagnosed Neville with learning disability. That would make him
> not quite as normal as the rest of Gryffindors. Is it reasonable
> to expect a boy with extremely bad memory not to misplace a key
> when he misplaces everything else? I am not sure. But this
> situation is even worse than that. Sir Cadogan's passwords are
> described as "ridiculously complicated" and he moreover "changed
> them at least twice a day". Even if it is reasonable to expect
> a thirteen year old boy with notoriously bad memory not to
> loose his key, it would be absolutely unreasonable to expect
> him to memorise complicated code combinations which are changed
> at least twice a day.

Shaun:

To an extent, I agree with you. It is not entirely reasonable to expect a 
child with CAPD (and I really do think that's what Neville most likely has, 
and most of the other alternatives would actually be less likely to cause 
him problems in this particular case) to remember complicated passwords that 
change regularly. That's why I've said on a number of occasions now that I 
can understand why Neville felt the need to write the passwords down and 
that particular situation doesn't worry me too much. But it's only the first 
of three steps in the chain that lead to the problem.

It is reasonable to expect him to maintain tight control of the list. Yes, 
he might find that somewhat more difficult than most people - but just 
because something is difficult, doesn't excuse not doing it. Your assumption 
seems to me to be that just because a child finds something difficult, it's 
reasonable for them not to do it. It's not.

I actually have a mild case of an APD myself - slightly different from the 
CAPD I think Neville has, and nowhere near as serious as the level Neville 
seems to have. This makes it difficult for me to be in a crowded room full 
of people talking. I'm very uncomfortable in such situations. But I have to 
deal with them every single day in the real world. When I was at school, 
should they have let me stay in a room by myself all the time, just because 
it was harder for me than it is for 'normal' people to be out there? No. 
That's not the right approach. When a disability makes things harder for 
you, you have to learn to do them anyway. Neville's problems don't mean he 
shouldn't be expected to do what is normally expected of other students.

My APD also means I am fairly incapable of doing anything musical. Music to 
me apparently sounds like random noise does to other people (I say 
apparently, because I have no real reference for what music is meant to 
sound like). Nonetheless I was expected to - and I did - get through nine 
years of music lessons at school with pretty adequate marks. I even managed 
to do well enough in music classes during my teaching degree that, on paper, 
I'm a qualified music teacher. I *completely* bombed out of the attempt that 
was made to teach me a music instrument because that was genuinely beyond 
what I'm capable of. But despite my disability, I could still manage to do 
the majority of what was expected of any other student in this regard. Was 
it harder for me? Yeah, it was. I used to go out and vomit after some of my 
music lessons because from my perspective I'd just spent fifty minutes in a 
room full of the most hideous din imaginable. But I got through it.

Just because a child has a disability, doesn't mean you stop expecting them 
to do what they are capable of doing. A child with the characteristics we've 
seen described in Neville will find a lot of things harder than average - 
and there might occasionally be something that is completely unreasonable 
for him to be expected to do - but most of the time, even though it's 
harder, it's not impossible.

Should Professor McGonagall have put some strategy in place for Neville to 
help him in a situation where the passwords are constantly changing?

*If* she is aware of the fact that Neville has a difficulty with the 
passwords, then, yes, I would think it was reasonable to expect her to do 
something. But do we know that Professor McGonagall is aware of this problem 
that Neville has? Do we know that Professor McGonagall knows Neville has a 
problem with the passwords? If we do, then, yes, I think it's reasonable to 
expect her to have taken some steps once the situation regarding passwords 
became even more difficult. But if she didn't know, that's another matter.

This isn't a classroom situation - it's generally reasonable to expect a 
teacher to pick up that a student has problems in their classroom. But just 
a random problem that occurs outside of their sight. That's different. Has 
anybody told Professor McGonagall about Neville's problems with the 
passwords? Has Neville?

In 'Order of the Phoenix', Professor McGonagall talks to the class about 
their O.W.L.s:

"'You cannot pass an O.W.L.,' said Professor McGonagall grimly, 'without 
serious application, practice, and study. I see no reason why anybody in 
this class should not achieve an O.W.L. in Transfiguration as long as they 
put in the work.' Neville made a sad little disbelieving noise. 'Yes, you 
too, Longbottom,' said Professor McGonagall. 'There's nothing wrong with 
your work except lack of confidence."

Professor McGonagall has noticed Neville has problems in her class. She's 
identified what she believes to be the cause - lack of confidence. Not lack 
of memory.

Yes, Neville does have memory problems - we know that. But are they his 
biggest problems? Neville obviously has a memory that *does* work in many 
cases. He's not constantly forgetting people's names. He manages to navigate 
the rather complicated architecture of the castle, so he has spatial memory. 
He can remember things he's read in books about Herbology - his memory isn't 
perfect, but a lot of it is working properly. He just has a few deficient 
areas. (this all fits the pattern of CAPD). He manages to deal with his 
memory issues most of the time, in most cases - and reasonably well at that. 
Professor McGonagall may quite reasonably not know that he has a problem 
with the passwords unless somebody has told her.

If they have, then, yes, it's reasonable to expect her to have done 
something in this case. And if she didn't, then, yes, she shares part of the 
blame for the consequences. But even in that situation, it's only part of 
the blame.

She might be viewed as being responsible for Neville feeling he had no 
choice but to write a list. But she's not responsible for the fact that he 
is careless with it. And he's not responsible for his failure to report it's 
loss.

When Professor McGonagall arranged for Hermione to be given a Time Turner - 
if Hermione had then chosen to use that Time Turner to rob Honeydukes, would 
you be claiming Professor McGonagall bore all the responsibility for that 
and Hermione none at all? Somehow I doubt it. Even though you could 
certainly claim that if she'd done things differently, the crime could never 
have happened.

> > Shaun:
> > And I believe it is even if that boy does have memory issues. That might
> > make the second of those two expectations somewhat more difficult for 
> > him,
> > but it shouldn't impact the first or the third to any significant 
> > degree.
> >
> > And in a sense, it's even more important you do this with kids who have
> > learning difficulties. If you allow a child's learning difficulties to 
> > stop
> > you letting them do things they should be capable of, then you're not 
> > doing the
> > child a service. You're actually doing them a great disservice. There 
> > are
> > limits - no child with a learning difficulty should ever be knowingly be 
> > placed in
> > a situation which their LD actually prevents them from doing.
>
> a_svirn:
> Which exactly what happened with Neville.

Shaun:

I do not believe it is. In my professional judgement as a qualified special 
education teacher with experience in the field, it is not unreasonable to 
expect a 13 year old child displaying the characteristics of LD that Neville 
Longbottom displays to take a reasonable degree of care with a list of 
passwords (equivalent to a house key) and to report the loss of that list if 
he does lose it. That's not an unreasonable expectation given the degree of 
impairment he displays (relatively moderate) and the list of competencies he 
has developed (generally within normal expectations for a child his age).

> Shaun:
>
> > Here we get into a really esoteric area - the legal basis of teaching. 
> > You
> > may not agree that teachers' rights are equal to those of parents (and I
> > absolutely believe that they shouldn't be) but unfortunately, perhaps 
> > for
> > both of us, it's a long held principle of British common law that they 
> > are.
> > The doctrine of 'in loco parentis' goes back literally to the middle 
> > ages
> > and all indications are still very strong that it applies at Hogwarts 
> > (the
> > only time we ever see a permission slip required of students is when 
> > they
> > are going to be allowed to leave the grounds of the school to go into
> > Hogsmeade, in other words, when they might arguably be stepping outside 
> > the
> > authority of the school.
>
> a_svirn:
> Yes, Hogwarts attitude towards the rights of parents does seem somewhat
> medieval, especially when it comes to muggle parents.

Shaun:

Just a note - just because the doctrine of 'in loco parentis' dates back to 
the middle ages, it doesn't mean it's not a modern doctrine as well. It 
still applies in British Common Law and is still considered relevant today. 
It still partly governs what teachers are expected to do in Muggle schools 
all over Britain (and the concept is retained in the Childrens Act of 1989). 
It's an old concept in origin, but it's still a modern concept in practice.

Shaun:

> > Have we ever seen Professor McGonagall require a student to do something 
> > we
> > know to be contrary to the rules of the school? For the life of me, I 
> > can't
> > think of a single case.

> a_svirn:
> Yes, we have - when she made Harry a seeker in his first year. And that's 
> a
> far more important rule than appropriateness of large ornamental 
> butterflies.

Shaun:

Yes, it is - but, no, Professor McGonagall did not act contrary to the rules 
of the school.

"I shall speak to Professor Dumbledore and see if we can't bend the 
first-year rule."

She asks the Headmaster for permission to bend (not break) a rule. She 
doesn't ignore it. She doesn't break it. And she does what she does only 
with the permission of the Headmaster. Generally speaking, somebody in most 
schools can exempt students from particular rules (my Headmaster did it for 
me, which caused a great deal of trouble at one point!), that's not the same 
as breaking them.

There actually doesn't seem to be a rule against a first year being on the 
Quidditch team - there does seem to be a rule about brooms and first years, 
but it really does seem as if an exemption was made in this case rather than 
a rule being broken.

"'Yes, yes, that's right,' said Professor Flitwick, beaming at Harry. 
'Professor McGonagall told me all about the special circumstances, Potter. 
And what model is it?'"

A special circumstance exemption is not the same as breaking a rule. My 
school had rules about no earrings - but one boy who was a professional 
actor and who needed to have his ears pierced for a role was allowed an 
exemption (I found this out when I told him off for it - he's now one of 
Australia's leading actors). I was, for a brief period, exempted from the 
normal rule that required people to attend after school sports training on 
the ground that I lived so far from the school that staying late meant I had 
no way of getting home as the buses finished too early. The rules weren't 
changed - they just allowed exemptions in particular circumstances.

Alla:

> Well, sure there is a case of canon which we interpret
> differently - you argue that this is the reference to the
> school having regulations about the hairstyles and I am
> saying that this is professor McGonagall attacking
> student's taste. I was asking for the additional canon evidence.

Shaun:

Well, then, can I have your additional canon evidence that Professor 
McGonagall goes around attacking student's taste?

Seriously, I think this statement should be more than enough given what else 
we know of Professor McGonagall - she doesn't have a history of expecting 
students to do things that are inconsistent within the rules. Why assume she 
has at this point, rather than assume she'd made a request that is 
consistent with the rules of the school?

Alla:

> This is a very good example, one of those which is very high
> on my Snape as sadist list by the way. So, how does Ron
> saying that helped Harry? Ron did not say it to Snape's face,
> didn't he? I completely agreed with him simply because to me
> having a rule when student is  reading a book outside enjoying
> weather with his friends is absurd, it makes no sense. I would
> imagine teachers encouraging the boys to read. But many people
> still said that oh no, Ron does not know, of course there is
> such a rule. As to why Parvati would not protest, even if
> there is no such rule to me the answer is very simple - she
> would not want to get harsher punishment. Same way as fifty
> points for the House became fifty points each when somebody
> opened their mouth. Of course we do not know if it was supposed
> to be fifty points for the house, but in my opinion it was.

Shaun:

Ron saying it didn't help Harry - I'm just pointing out that when a student 
feels a teacher is not acting within the rules, they say so. Parvarti 
didn't - so why would we assume Professor McGonagall's instruction was out 
of line?

I do take your point about the 'fifty points from Gryffindor' situation, but 
in that case, Harry, Hermione, and Neville had unambiguously broken the 
rules. They had no right to protest that they hadn't done anything wrong. 
But Professor McGonagall does seem willing to listen to an explanation that 
is within the rules - Harry successfully convinces her (even though she is 
angry at the time) not to take points away from Ron and himself after their 
arrival at school by car in Chamber of Secrets, on a mere technicality. I 
find it hard to see any reason for Parvarti to be worried if she's in the 
right. I don't believe Professor McGonagall would undermine herself in front 
of her entire assembled house (and with the entire school nearby and all of 
her colleagues), by punishing a student outside of the rules.

> Alla:
> "His hair was lank and greasy and was flopping onto the table,
> his hooked nose barely half an inch from the surface of the
> parchment as he scribbled" - p.641, OOP

Shaun:

I'd agree that would imply Snape's hair while at school was long, if not for 
the fact that his nose is 'barely half an inch from the surface of the 
parchment'

> "He was very good-looking; his dark hair fell into his eyes with a
> sort of casual elegance neither Kames, nor Harry could ever have
> achieved" - p.642, OOP
>
> I think hair flopping onto the table means that it was long enough,
> I cannot be hundred percent sure of course that Sirius' hair are
> that long however his hair certainly goes against another rule
> that you quoted - it is in his face and nobody is saying anything.

Shaun:

That's fringe length which is totally different. My school had rules on 
length of hair, but didn't worry about fringes at all, for example. Yes, 
some of the examples I've cited may refer to such things, but as I've said, 
those quotes are intended to show the wide range of different school rules 
that can affect hair, not to be a definitive list of what rules must apply 
in any individual school.

Incidentally, I am sure, we are told at some point, that Sirius had short 
hair when he was younger... I can't find it right now - I think it is when 
Harry is looking at a photo of him as a younger man.

Shaun:

> > The only regulation I'm fairly certain Hogwarts has is the only one 
> > we've
> > seen enforced - that there are limitations on what type of ornamentation
> > students can wear in their hair.
>
> Alla:
>
> So the one she is scolding her about is the only regulation they  have?

Shaun:

That's not what I said. I said that this is the only regulation I'm fairly 
certain of. There could well be a dozen others for all I know - but while 
I'm prepared to be fairly certain that a rule that I've seen enforced by a 
teacher exists, I'm not going to assume that a dozen other rules might not 
exist.

What matters isn't if Hogwarts has twenty five pages of rules on hair. What 
matters is whether McGonagalls *one* statement concerned *one* rule or not.

I can't see why people who assume that a teacher imposing compliance on a 
student is doing so in contravention of the rules, rather than in compliance 
of them.

> Magpie:
> Nobody said she was always wearing something odd, we said that she was
> obviously allowed to wear little ornaments like her necklace and earrings
> --which are no more elaborate than Parvati wearing a hairclip.

Shaun:

I don't believe that is obvious. The evidence in the text is that 
occasionally, Luna is seen wearing something ornamental - that does not 
prove that Hogwarts has no rules against ornamentation.

Ron is occasionally seen to swear in the text - does that prove that 
Hogwarts students are allowed to swear?

Personally, I'm inclined to the view that Hogwarts probably does allow 
students to wear some ornamentation during the course of normal school life 
and I would assume that what Luna is seen wearing is probably within the 
rules. I don't see any more reason to assume Luna is an incorrigible rule 
breaker than I see to assume that Professor McGonagall imposing standards of 
dress that aren't within the rules. But the thing is, I also see no reason 
to assume that just because we see Luna occasionally wearing some sort of 
ornamentation that this somehow demonstrates Hogwarts could not possibly 
have rules on hair ornaments, either in general, or on certain formal 
occasions.

There are real schools that allow girls to wear earrings - but not fashion 
hair clips. There are real schools that allow students to wear necklaces or 
pendants, but not particular types of hair ornamentation.

There are real schools that allow students a certain degree of freedom as to 
what they wear on a normal school day - but clamp down with stricter rules 
on special occasions.

Have a read of the following:

"But even now building extensions hide the Rigg block and creep towards the 
south wing. The school is stretching itself and boys and staff alike see 
progress almost daily. Bonhomie, smiles and restlessness. In-school dress is 
most often a grey jumper with black and red cuffs and neck, no coat. It is a 
free-movement dress; it is a free-movement community."

That's the first part of a paragraph from a book about certain Australian 
schools. That paragraph is specifically part of a one and a half page of 
description of the school I attended from the age of 14. And it's an 
accurate description.

But if I'd walked into the Great Hall (we did have one, though it was 
nowhere near as cool as Hogwarts) for a school assembly wearing my 'grey 
jumper with black and red cuffs and neck' rather than my blazer, I'd have 
earned a detention within about ten seconds. Because formal assemblies were 
subject to different rules from those we were expected to follow at normal 
times.

At the point where Professor McGonagall tells Parvarti to take the butterfly 
out of her hair, Gryffindor and the school in general are assembled for a 
special event - to greet visitors to the school. It is one of the only times 
in all the books where we are told the students are wearing their cloaks and 
hats, not just the robes they seem to wear all the time. I think it's more 
than reasonable to assume that this is a time when the rules on appearance 
must just be stricter than they are everyday. I really don't think that's an 
unreasonable supposition and I think it's a supposition that's borne out by 
Professor McGonagall's actions and Parvarti's response

Magpie:

> You seem to be interpreting the scene by saying that if McGonagall
> told Parvati to take out her hair clip therefore there must be a
> rule against them that McGonagall is just following objectively.

Shaun:

Correct. That's my assumption. I don't see any reason to assume a fair 
teacher has suddenly become unfair simply because she's done something we 
haven't seen her do before. It's far simpler to assume that she's doing 
something she's perfectly within her rights to do.

Magpie:

> I see the scene as showing McGonagall's personal aversion. The
> hair regulations at whatever schools you have studied are not canon,

Shaun:

Nor is the idea that Hogwarts wouldn't have such rules. But as I've said 
above, I'm not sure there's any canon that Hogwarts has rules that says 
students can't swear. But I doubt anybody seriously thinks students are 
allowed to go around telling teachers to... well, you can guess.

"It was lucky, perhaps, that both Harry and Ron started shouting at Snape at 
the same time; lucky their voices echoed so much in the stone corridor, for 
in the confused din, it was impossible for them to hear exactly what they 
were calling him. He got the gist, however."

OK - anybody seriously want to argue that Snape was unjustified in punishing 
the two boys on that occasion because there's nothing in canon that says 
it's against the school rules to call teachers names? Somehow I doubt it. 
Why? Because most people would accept that Hogwarts probably does have such 
rules because they intended schools with such rules.

Well - most English kids attend schools which have rules about hair.

Magpie:
> I don't see why the fact that she doesn't always get described
> as wearing odd things negates what anybody's said. Luna's shown
> casually wearing ornamentation in class that's no less elaborate
> than a hair pin shaped like a butterfly so why would we think
> that was against the rules? We know it's not a formal school
> occasion. It's a reason for us to see that at least in everyday
> wear, this is fine. Hermione's bushy hair is also fine even on
> a formal occasion.

Shaun:

No, but apparently it somehow negates what I've said and I don't see why 
that is happening either.

Plenty of schools have rules that allow some ornamentation to some parts of 
the body without it being open slather that everything else is allowed. The 
fact that a student might be allowed to wear a necklace or a set of earrings 
tells us precisely nothing about whether or not they are allowed to wear 
large butterfly pins in their hair.

I've gone to considerable trouble to show that schools can have widely 
different rules on these points, and that there are some schools where they 
seem to allow some forms of ornamentation and not allow others. Can I prove 
that these means Hogwarts has particular rules like these - no, I can't. But 
the fact that schools with rules like those do exist is pretty clear 
evidence that the fact we see an example of one thing being allowed at 
Hogwarts is not proof that something else is automatically allowed.

Magpie:
> My point in reading the scene has nothing to do with rules
> at Hogwarts or other boarding schools. I'm just talking about
> how McGonagall is characterized. You say that you can't
> remember her ever breaking the rules. She is shown letting her
> personal desires to interfere with the rules, most blatantly
> when she swoops in after watching Harry flying around against
> the rules in his first flying lesson and instead of giving him
> detention she eagerly breaks another rule to get him on her
> Quidditch team. And lets him have a broom as a first year.
> One of the first times we get to know McGonagall we see her
> putting her desire to win at Quidditch above the rules even
> if it's unfair to other first years.

Shaun:

These are not examples of Professor McGonagall breaking any rules. Let's 
break this down.

(1) Professor McGonagall does not punish Harry for flying around against the 
rules in his first flying lesson.

There's no law that says teachers *have* to punish students *every* time 
they break a rule. In fact, very, very few teachers punish every single 
rules violation - you should only punish if it's going to serve some 
purpose. Yes, Harry's broken a rule - and Professor McGonagall would be 
completely within her rights if she chose to punish him for that. She's just 
as much within her rights to choose not to punish him. Deciding not to 
punish a student is not breaking any rule at all.

There's also the added consideration that if any punishment is going to be 
handed out to Harry for what he did there, strictly speaking, it probably 
should come from Madam Hooch. It's not inappropriate for a House Mistress to 
discipline a student for misbehaving in another teacher's class by any 
means, but if you have a decent level of respect for your colleagues, it's 
not something you'd do lightly. Personally, I think Professor McGonagall is 
at fault in this case, simply because her response has probably actually 
made it fairly difficult for Madam Hooch if she wants to punish Harry. But 
that's a matter of her being too lenient, not being too strict, on this 
occasion.

(2) There doesn't actually seem to be any rule preventing first years from 
playing Quidditch - it's just been a very long time since any first year was 
chosen for a team, and so it's become standard practice. The first-year rule 
seems to be about owning a broom at school. So there's no rules violation at 
just choosing Harry to be seeker.

(3) Yes, there is a rule about first-years and brooms - but Professor 
McGonagall asks Professor Dumbledore - the Headmaster and her boss - if that 
rule can be bent on this occasion. There is a big difference between bending 
a rule or allowing for a special-circumstances exemption and breaking it.

Is it unfair to Harry to have a broom when other first-years aren't allowed 
to? Yes, I think it is. But it's not breaking the rules.

Magpie:
> I think she's consistently shown as more like Hermione -
> she in general thinks rules should be followed, but will
> break them when something more important to her comes up
> (whether something ethical like standing against Umbridge
> or something personal). More importantly for this discussion,
> which was originally about the feelings she's acting on,
> she has been known to let her emotions effect how she's
> punishing people. She makes personal remarks about Neville.
> She's angry and afraid about someone getting into the Tower
> and gives him a particularly humiliating punishment in
> response to it, not really caring if the constantly
> changing passwords probably insured that Neville wasn't
> even the only person writing them down.

Shaun:

But he was the one who lost them (from everybody's perspective at the time) 
and didn't report their loss. Besides if twenty people break the rules and 
you're unlucky enough to be the only one caught, that doesn't mean it's 
wrong that you're punished.

I believe there are occasions where Professor McGonagall is willing to be 
more lenient than the rules allow for. I believe there are occasions where 
she's willing to bend the rules. I don't believe there's any evidence that 
she breaks them.

I also agree that there are occasions when Professor McGonagall's emotions 
affect how she punishes people. *But* that's not necessarily a bad thing. It 
*is* if it means that the person in question winds up being more severely 
punished than they deserve to be. But one does not necessarily follow the 
other.

Do you believe teachers should be totally emotionless beings who never let 
their emotions impact the way they deal with their students? I don't believe 
that personally, but I can understand why somebody might believe that was 
appropriate.

Let me just quote from the Order of the Phoenix:

"Professor McGonagall sat down behind her desk, frowning at Harry. Then she 
said, 'Have a biscuit, Potter.'

'Have - what?'

'Have a biscuit,' she repeated impatiently, indicating a tartan tin lying on 
top of one of the piles of papers on her desk. 'And sit down.'

There had been a previous occasion when Harry, expecting to be caned by 
Professor McGonagall, had instead been appointed by her to the Gryffindor 
Quidditch team. He sank into a chair opposite her and helped himself to a 
Ginger Newt, feeling just as confused and wrong-footed as he had done on 
that occasion.

Professor McGonagall set down Professor Umbridge's note and looked very 
seriously at Harry.

'Potter, you need to be careful.'

Harry swallowed his mouthful of Ginger Newt and stared at her. Her tone of 
voice was not at all what he was used to; it was not brisk, crisp, and 
stern; it was low and anxious and somehow much more human than usual."

It seems to me pretty clear in that quote, that Professor McGonagall is 
allowing her emotions to affect positively the way she is treating Harry. Is 
that wrong?

As I said, I can understand some people might believe that it is wrong. I'd 
disagree though. I think part of being a good teacher - and I think this is 
especially true in a boarding school environment - is being willing to 
develop an emotional connection to your students and being willing to let 
them know about it.

It can become wrong - if it means you, in the heat of anger, punish a 
student more severely than is reasonable, that's wrong. It's also wrong if 
you allow emotion to stop you from punishing a student in a case where that 
is what the student needs (although that's probably a rarer situation). But 
there's nothing wrong with allowing your pride in a student to show in 
appropriate cases and appropriate ways - and it's no more wrong to allow 
anger to show in appropriate cases and appropriate ways.

In some ways, I was a bit like Neville at school. I was... sensitive to 
criticism, I was easily scared by teachers. I was made that way by a year of 
total hell at 12 in a school that was totally wrong for me. I came out of 
that year with what I now know to have been a mild case of post-traumatic 
stress disorder and it showed. I cried easily. I was easily hurt. I was a 
natural target for bullies - always had been - but now it affected me worse.

When I was fifteen, my English teacher - she was one of the best teachers I 
ever had. She was a fairly rare female teacher at my school, and she was a 
very gifted teacher. I loved her classes. I liked her a lot - and she liked 
me. Now, as I just said, I was bullied a fair bit at school - at the school 
from hell, I was bullied constantly but at this school, it was much rarer. 
Still happened though, and it hurt me. One of the things I really liked 
about this school is that unlike any other school I'd been at, bullying was 
taken very seriously, and bullies were seriously punished when caught. It 
made me feel safer.

One day in English class, another boy had to get up to make a presentation 
in front of the class, something I found very easy to do. He didn't. He 
stammered, he stuttered - and for some reason, I don't know why and I hate 
to admit it, I laughed at him and made some sort of snide comment.

My teacher - this teacher I liked and who liked me - she tore me apart. 
Publically and savagely in front of my entire class. She yelled at me, yes. 
She berated me for being mean and cruel. I was terrified. Our teachers could 
cane - I'd have much rather had a caning. She was pretty brutal in what she 
said.

The thing is, I deserved it. And I'm very glad she did it. Because I never, 
ever came close to doing anything like that again at school.

Was she wrong to do it? Some people would say she was. But the fact was I 
had done something horrible, it had upset her, and she let me know it. If 
she'd hidden her feelings, it wouldn't have had anywhere near the impact it 
did on me. I wish she'd been able to find a different way of doing it 
because it was horribly unpleasant, but I'm not sure she could have.

My point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with a teacher letting 
their students know that they are angry. There is something wrong if, in 
their anger, they do something they shouldn't have. As I've said in a 
previous message, I think Neville's punishment - loss of Hogsmeade visits 
*and* a Detention - is somewhat excessive. I also think the apparent 
escalation of '50 points' for three students to '50 points each' seen in 
Philosopher's Stone could be viewed as excessive punishment. I can easily 
believe that Professor McGonagall may in certain circumstances punish a 
student more severely than she otherwise would and that may come from anger. 
And I won't defend that if that's happened.

*But* it's different from the issues I've been arguing about here. In the 
case of Parvarti's butterfly, Pavarti wasn't punished at all. In the case of 
Neville, even if his imposed punishment was excessive, he'd still done 
something seriously wrong. I don't believe Professor McGonagall unfairly 
punishes students. If she hands out a punishment, it's because the student 
did something to deserve it.

And if she does punish more severely than is *necessary*, on occasion, I 
haven't seen an example where she's punished more severely than is 
justifiable. The distinction is a real one. There is a serious difference 
between a punishment that is more severe than it might have been, and a 
punishment that is totally disproportionate to the offence. The former is 
much more defensible than the latter.

Magpie:
> And in the scene with Parvati, she snaps about her having
> a "ridiculous" thing in her hair when she's nervously
> awaiting teachers with whom she has a rivalry (just as
> she has a rivalry in Quidditch). She doesn't tell her
> to take out the clip because it's not regulation, she
> snaps that it's ridiculous-looking as well.

Shaun:

If I tell a student to stop swearing, I don't generally feel the need to 
remind him it's against the rules. He knows it's against the rules. That 
doesn't need to be said. I *might* mention the rules if I believe there's a 
reason why he might not know about that particular rule, but generally 
speaking I wouldn't mention that at all. I assume students know the rules.

Magpie:
> I took from the scene that she's annoyed that a girl
> is wearing a clip that indicates she's not a serious
> student but a girl hoping a boy from another school
> will notice her. That will make her school look bad.
> But whether or not she's got an actual rule here that
> she's enforcing (which she doesn't say she does),
> her insult is showing her emotions about it, imo.

Shaun:

Yes, probably, you can say it's showing her emotion. I would get annoyed as 
well if one of my students chose to violate a rule for no good reason at a 
time we've assembled the entire school. Why shouldn't I be? They know the 
rule, and there's no good reason for them to break it. Teachers are not 
emotionless automatons - and it's not good for students if they act like 
they are.

Do you want kids taught by robots? I don't.

Carol:

> As for students with unusual hairstyles, Lee Jordan's dreadlocks
> have already been cited. Young Severus Snape, at the time he was
> attending Hogwarts and had McGonagall for Transfiguration
> (though admittedly she was not his HoH) had hair long enough to
> drag on his DADA OWL exam as he wrote. But the best example is
> probably Angelina Johnson (who normally wears her hair in long
> plaits like Parvati and a number or other girls) being taunted
> by Pansy Parkinson during Quidditch practice:
>
"Hey, Johnson, what's with that hairstyle, anyway? Why would anyone
> want to look like they've got worms coming out of their head?"
> (OoP chapter 14).

Shaun:

Check the next line.

"Angelina swept her long, braided hair out of her face and said calmly, 
'Spread out, then, and let's see what we can do...'"

Long, braided hair - her hairstyle is not described by the narrator as being 
anything unusual. This reads as if Pansy is just looking for an excuse to 
shout abuse. It no more shows that there's anything wrong with Angelina's 
hair, than screaming out "Four-Eyes!" would indicate something looked weird 
about a person wearing glasses. Kids will try and tease other kids about 
their appearance, even when there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Carol:
> Evidently, Hogwarts has no rules regarding hairstyles (or
> unnatural hair color--Tonks would have been in violation of
> the rules for her whole seven years!).

Shaun:

Even if Pansy's comment showed that Hogwarts had no rules about hairstyles 
at Quidditch matches, it wouldn't tell us anything about whether or not they 
have rules against large ornamental hair accessories on formal occasions.

And for Tonks, bubblegum pink is a natural hair colour. Seriously, I'm sure 
there are no rules against things a student can't help - I am under the 
impression Tonks normally has total control over her hair colour, so she 
might well have been expected to keep it a normal colour at school. But if 
she couldn't control it, I'd assume that's an exception. It's not a 
universal truth, but common sense does get applied to many schools rules 
where necessary.

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia



Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia 




From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Fri May 22 15:12:08 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 15:12:08 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <CD948EC790994780AFFDF94BF9A2BC84@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gv6fc8+p8gu@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186710

> > Magpie:
> > Nobody said she was always wearing something odd, we said that she was
> > obviously allowed to wear little ornaments like her necklace and earrings
> > --which are no more elaborate than Parvati wearing a hairclip.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> I don't believe that is obvious. The evidence in the text is that 
> occasionally, Luna is seen wearing something ornamental - that does not 
> prove that Hogwarts has no rules against ornamentation.
> 
> Ron is occasionally seen to swear in the text - does that prove that 
> Hogwarts students are allowed to swear?

Magpie:
I see that obviously the school could have some rules that aren't strictly enforced, or maybe what Luna's doing doesn't break them. But since this is fiction the simplest way of looking at it seems more useful. Ron doesn't swear to his teachers, and I think the way they're expected to speak to teachers is shown in the reactions of teachers. Luna's shown casually wearing funky earrings and things to class with no reaction and I took it as a sign that that's okay.  

But regardless, that's still not the point of what I see in the McGonagall scene. It's that McGonagall does have a pattern of letting her personal feelings effect the way she disciplines people (just as Hermione does). I don't think the GoF scene is about McGonagall enforcing a dress code according to any theory of teaching, but about showing McGonagall being nervous about making a good impression and snapping at Parvati in irritation for looking like a flirt. Whether there's an actual dress code is irrelevent. Whether she has the right to tell her what to wear matters less than how she chooses to do it in this moment imo, if we're talking about what's going on with McGonagall and Parvati here.

Shaun:
> At the point where Professor McGonagall tells Parvarti to take the butterfly 
> out of her hair, Gryffindor and the school in general are assembled for a 
> special event - to greet visitors to the school. It is one of the only times 
> in all the books where we are told the students are wearing their cloaks and 
> hats, not just the robes they seem to wear all the time. I think it's more 
> than reasonable to assume that this is a time when the rules on appearance 
> must just be stricter than they are everyday. I really don't think that's an 
> unreasonable supposition and I think it's a supposition that's borne out by 
> Professor McGonagall's actions and Parvarti's response

Magpie:
Which is a perfectly fine reading imo, unless it removes the character moment for McGonagall. If the whole point of that moment is to tell us that Hogwarts has a formal dress code they use when greeting visitors which disallows hairclips (as I said, I'm pretty sure GoF has them wearing hats more casually) and McGonagall is just enforcing the rule, then I disagree with that reading. Whether or not McGonagall has a dress code to back her up seems completely unimportant to me. As a teacher she seems to have the authority to to give all sorts of random orders to students. Having the authority doesn't mean she can't be taking out her nervousness on a student by being insulting. I've never made any case for McGonagall being out of line because she has no right to say what she's saying here based on Hogwarts rules. I'm arguing that the moment isn't in there to tell us about Hogwarts dress code one way or the other.


> Magpie:
> > My point in reading the scene has nothing to do with rules
> > at Hogwarts or other boarding schools. I'm just talking about
> > how McGonagall is characterized. You say that you can't
> > remember her ever breaking the rules. She is shown letting her
> > personal desires to interfere with the rules, most blatantly
> > when she swoops in after watching Harry flying around against
> > the rules in his first flying lesson and instead of giving him
> > detention she eagerly breaks another rule to get him on her
> > Quidditch team. And lets him have a broom as a first year.
> > One of the first times we get to know McGonagall we see her
> > putting her desire to win at Quidditch above the rules even
> > if it's unfair to other first years.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> These are not examples of Professor McGonagall breaking any rules. Let's 
> break this down.
> 
> (1) Professor McGonagall does not punish Harry for flying around against the 
> rules in his first flying lesson.
> 
> There's no law that says teachers *have* to punish students *every* time 
> they break a rule. In fact, very, very few teachers punish every single 
> rules violation - you should only punish if it's going to serve some 
> purpose. Yes, Harry's broken a rule - and Professor McGonagall would be 
> completely within her rights if she chose to punish him for that. She's just 
> as much within her rights to choose not to punish him. Deciding not to 
> punish a student is not breaking any rule at all.

Magpie:
It seems like you're arguing technicalities about rules when I'm talking about what it's showing about the character. When I said it was McGonagall "breaking the rules" I wasn't trying to claim that she was breaking rules imposed on *her* by not punishing Harry. I was pointing out that obviously McGonagall does not think it's so important that she enforce the no brooms for freshman or no flying while the teacher is away or no first years playing Quidditch rules when she gets something out of it. I think that's what everyone meant when they brought it up. I'm not creating an imaginary teacher's handbook and finding McGonagall in violation of it. 

Likewise, I know that she asks Dumbledore to bend the rule about first years and brooms. She asks him to bend it because she's got something at stake and the rule is now inconvenient to her and so she doesn't want it enforced. She wants the rule waived in this case, just as she wants the tradition/rule of first years not playing not enforced and doesn't want to punish Harry for flying when the teacher told him not to, but rather to reward him for it. That she technically stays within school rules for herself because she's got the authority to override them or gets to choose whether to punish someone or goes to Dumbledore to get the rule waived I'm not arguing with.

> Shaun:
> 
> I believe there are occasions where Professor McGonagall is willing to be 
> more lenient than the rules allow for. I believe there are occasions where 
> she's willing to bend the rules. I don't believe there's any evidence that 
> she breaks them.

Magpie:
Wow. If I was a kid in that school who said McGonagall broke the no brooms for first years rule for Harry and some teacher told me that no, she only bent the rules, I'd just take that as proof that the teachers weren't fair and I shouldn't expect them to be. 

Shaun:
 
> I also agree that there are occasions when Professor McGonagall's emotions 
> affect how she punishes people. *But* that's not necessarily a bad thing. It 
> *is* if it means that the person in question winds up being more severely 
> punished than they deserve to be. But one does not necessarily follow the 
> other.

Magpie:
It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I thought this thread was originally about what McGonagall humiliating Neville and insulting Parvati because she found that emotionally satisfying--just as Snape does when he humiliates and insults students.

Shaun: 
> Do you believe teachers should be totally emotionless beings who never let 
> their emotions impact the way they deal with their students? I don't believe 
> that personally, but I can understand why somebody might believe that was 
> appropriate.

Magpie:
Nope, not at all. I talked here about what McGonagall's emotional state was, I never said she was wrong to have an emotional state. Neither Snape nor Lupin are emotionless beings, but their dealings with students are very different. Snape is more likely to put down a student than Lupin. McGonagall's emotional state does not always lead her to be harsh--sometimes it's the opposite. But when it's harsh it's harsh. Snape perhaps gets something out of insulting students that Lupin doesn't.

Shaun:

> My point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with a teacher letting 
> their students know that they are angry. There is something wrong if, in 
> their anger, they do something they shouldn't have. 

Magpie:
I agree. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with McGonagall or Snape showing their students how they feel. But I don't think McGonagall's moments of taking her anger out on students are always positive or for the student's benefit. In your case, you actually did something mean to another person. Neville's losing the passwords understandably made her angry, but I don't think her continued humiliation punishment did him or anyone any good. And I don't see what her snapping at Parvati did for her. In the case with Neville she was afraid due to danger so there'd be a reason for her to want to shake sense into Neville, much as your teacher would see a reason to shake sense into you about being cruel to others. Her anger at Parvati seems just catty and personal and momentary.


Shaun:
> *But* it's different from the issues I've been arguing about here. In the 
> case of Parvarti's butterfly, Pavarti wasn't punished at all.

Magpie:
No, she was insulted. McGonagall was focused on how she wanted her students to come across, got angry that Parvati was the flirty girl she always was trying to make a different sort of impression, and snapped at her that she looked ridiculous. Just as Snape doesn't punish Hermione in the "I see no difference" scene, he just insults her.

> Shaun:
> 
> If I tell a student to stop swearing, I don't generally feel the need to 
> remind him it's against the rules. He knows it's against the rules. That 
> doesn't need to be said. I *might* mention the rules if I believe there's a 
> reason why he might not know about that particular rule, but generally 
> speaking I wouldn't mention that at all. I assume students know the rules.

Magpie:
Do you feel the need to make a personal comment about him in general that's got nothing to do with swearing? If so, are you doing that to objectively enforce the rules or do you just find the kid irritating and want him to know that?

The automoton idea is a strawman--neither of us expects the teachers to do that. The thread was not, as I understood it, ever really supposed to be about whether Hogwarts had rules about hair clips, a fact that doesn't exist one way or the other. I thought it started with a_svirn pointing out that there seemed to be different judgments made on Snape and McGonagall when they behaved in similar ways, based on the idea that Snape was a sadist at heart, so when he humiliated or insulted students or enforced the rules according to his desires it was a sign of his inner sadism and unfairness, while McGonagall was a good person so when she did these things it wasn't a sign of inner sadism or unfairness like Snape's. 

-m




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Fri May 22 15:49:11 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 15:49:11 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <CD948EC790994780AFFDF94BF9A2BC84@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gv6hhn+mbvo@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186711

> Shaun:
> And the fact that Professor McGonagall chooses to reprimand a student on a 
> formal occasion for having something inappropriate in her hair, suggests 
> that Hogwarts does have such rules. Does it prove it? No, it doesn't. But if 
> people are going to base a case for attacking a teacher as having done 
> something inappropriate, then in my view the burden of evidence should be on 
> them to prove it wasn't something the teacher was allowed to do under the 
> school rules - 

a_svirn:
I fail entirely to see how it is my burden. Neither narrator, nor McGonagall herself says anything about any rules Parvati allegedly violated. Nowhere in the books are hairstyle regulations mentioned. You are the one who makes this claim, and the only thing you've come up with by way of supporting it is your own real life experience. Which, of course, cannot be convincingly cited as "proof" of anything Hogwarts-related. Sorry, but that burden is all yours. 

> Shaun:
> The position that Professor McGonagall is doing something inappropriate in 
> this case is founded upon an assumption that she could not possibly be 
> enforcing a rule. The position that she might be acting entirely 
> appropriately on the other hand is merely founded upon an assumption that 
> maybe Hogwarts has a rule that is quite typical and exists in many schools.

a_svirn:
"Assumption" being the operative word here. Your assumption seems to be that if she does it then it's OK, because she is a teacher. Neither my real-life experience, nor my knowledge about Hogwarts teachers en masse and McGonagall in particular leads me to assume anything of the sort. 


> Shaun:
> This isn't a criminal trial, but in law, a person is considered innocent 
> unless proven guilty. 

a_svirn:
Someone should have explained it to McGonagall ? she's rather an off-with-his-head type. 


> a_svirn:
> > So do I. However, "normal" is an operative word here. You yourself
> > diagnosed Neville with learning disability. That would make him
> > not quite as normal as the rest of Gryffindors. Is it reasonable
> > to expect a boy with extremely bad memory not to misplace a key
> > when he misplaces everything else? I am not sure. But this
> > situation is even worse than that. Sir Cadogan's passwords are
> > described as "ridiculously complicated" and he moreover "changed
> > them at least twice a day". Even if it is reasonable to expect
> > a thirteen year old boy with notoriously bad memory not to
> > loose his key, it would be absolutely unreasonable to expect
> > him to memorise complicated code combinations which are changed
> > at least twice a day.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> To an extent, I agree with you. It is not entirely reasonable to expect a 
> child with CAPD (and I really do think that's what Neville most likely has, 
> and most of the other alternatives would actually be less likely to cause 
> him problems in this particular case) to remember complicated passwords that 
> change regularly.

a_svirn:
Meaning, to some extant it is still reasonable? Could you give one example of its relative reasonableness? 

> Shaun:
 That's why I've said on a number of occasions now that I 
> can understand why Neville felt the need to write the passwords down and 
> that particular situation doesn't worry me too much. But it's only the first 
> of three steps in the chain that lead to the problem.
> 
> It is reasonable to expect him to maintain tight control of the list. Yes, 
> he might find that somewhat more difficult than most people - but just 
> because something is difficult, doesn't excuse not doing it. Your assumption 
> seems to me to be that just because a child finds something difficult, it's 
> reasonable for them not to do it. It's not.

a_svirn:
No, it is not my assumption at all. Neville certainly shares some responsibility for the whole password fiasco, but not the whole of it, and not even the most of it. My *concern* is that while the entire situation is of McGonagall's own making, the only one who's got blamed for the whole thing is Neville. This is a classic case of scapegoating: when a person of authority abjures any responsibility for her own neglect and carelessness and lays the blame squarely on the victim of the said neglect. 

> Shaun:
> Should Professor McGonagall have put some strategy in place for Neville to 
> help him in a situation where the passwords are constantly changing?
> 
> *If* she is aware of the fact that Neville has a difficulty with the 
> passwords, then, yes, I would think it was reasonable to expect her to do 
> something. But do we know that Professor McGonagall is aware of this problem 
> that Neville has? 

a_svirn:
She'd have to suffer from a serious case of a memory loss herself, not to be aware of the potencial problem. 

> Shaun:
Do we know that Professor McGonagall knows Neville has a 
> problem with the passwords? If we do, then, yes, I think it's reasonable to 
> expect her to have taken some steps once the situation regarding passwords 
> became even more difficult. But if she didn't know, that's another matter.

a_svirn:
Didn't know or didn't want to know? Or care? 

> Shaun:
> When Professor McGonagall arranged for Hermione to be given a Time Turner - 
> if Hermione had then chosen to use that Time Turner to rob Honeydukes, would 
> you be claiming Professor McGonagall bore all the responsibility for that 
> and Hermione none at all? Somehow I doubt it. 

a_svirn:
So do I. What does it have to do with anything?

> Shaun:
> 
In my professional judgement as a qualified special 
> education teacher with experience in the field, it is not unreasonable to 
> expect a 13 year old child displaying the characteristics of LD that Neville 
> Longbottom displays to take a reasonable degree of care with a list of 
> passwords (equivalent to a house key) and to report the loss of that list if 
> he does lose it. That's not an unreasonable expectation given the degree of 
> impairment he displays (relatively moderate) and the list of competencies he 
> has developed (generally within normal expectations for a child his age).

a_svirn:
No one says it is. I wasn't talking about Neville's not taking proper care of the list. I was saying that Sir Cadogan's passwords were beyond his capabilities. As for the list, it was stolen from him ? can happen to anyone. Point is, McGonagall wilfully ignored and callously ridiculed his disability, and when her tactics backfired she punished the victim of her bullying ? Neville. 

> Shaun:
> 
> > > Have we ever seen Professor McGonagall require a student to do something 
> > > we
> > > know to be contrary to the rules of the school? For the life of me, I 
> > > can't
> > > think of a single case.
> 
> > a_svirn:
> > Yes, we have - when she made Harry a seeker in his first year. And that's 
> > a
> > far more important rule than appropriateness of large ornamental 
> > butterflies.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Yes, it is - but, no, Professor McGonagall did not act contrary to the rules 
> of the school.
> 
> "I shall speak to Professor Dumbledore and see if we can't bend the 
> first-year rule."
> 
> She asks the Headmaster for permission to bend (not break) a rule. 

a_svirn:
So what is the fundamental difference between "breaking" and "bending"? If it is a student who does it, then it is breaking, and when it is a teacher who does the breaking it is actually "bending"? 








From foxmoth at qnet.com  Fri May 22 16:53:40 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 16:53:40 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gv2167+jlmi@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv6lak+24ut@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186712


> 
> Betsy Hp:
> I don't think it's left for the reader, actually.  Certainly a reader *can* go back and reexamine the times Harry may have stumbled, but since the context is never changed (Draco is never recast as a victim in the ferret scene; Harry casting the cruciatus is never written as a moral mistake) I believe they're going against the text when they do so.  I think the reader is expected to just follow along after Harry and adopt his views as their own.  Especially by series end when he has it all figured out.

Pippin:
And what is his view at the end when he's got it all figured out? Draco isn't someone he likes or wants to emulate but he isn't someone to pick on. The government of the WW is safe in the hands of people like Shacklebolt who think that every life is worth the same. You'd be going against the text to think that Shacklebolt approves the use of cruciatus against suspects, or that Harry is going to swoop down on Draco and give him a few bounces for luck as soon as the book closes :)

It's a defining fact of human nature that we are able to learn from other people's mistakes.  I don't find it a stretch to suppose that Harry learned from Snape and Dumbledore.

> 
> Betsy Hp:
> I agree that canon shows Harry as someone who'd abuse power.  What I don't agree with is that canon shows us this consciously.  I see Harry as very much the wealthy, popular, beloved of the powers that be, type of student.

Pippin:
Why would Harry think  that a wealthy, popular, much-loved student couldn't abuse his power? James did. Dumbledore did.  That Harry has done well for himself would not convince him that he could never go wrong.

I think canon showed Harry that killing is harder than the innocent believe, but bullying, unfortunately,  is easier. He saw that many people are reluctant to kill unless they're desperate, but they don't have to be desperate to throw their weight around. They think it's justified, or they think there won't be any consequences that concern them. But canon shows Harry that righteous feelings are often mingled with others, and that the person who thinks that he must be immune to the consequences of unrighteous aggression because he's always escaped them so far is a fool. I don't think Harry wants to be a fool.

Pippin






From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Fri May 22 19:24:19 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 19:24:19 -0000
Subject: McGonagall & punishments: Hair, Long Beautiful Hair, Gleaming, Streaming,..
In-Reply-To: <gv1nvo+u646@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv6u53+4i2b@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186713

---  "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
 
> Alla:
> 
> ...
> 
> So, no, if there are no regulations, and Parvati did nothing 
> wrong, I do not think McGonagall had any right to do so.
> 
> I understand that she was freaking out, however she IMO was
>  chastising Parvati for not comforming to **her** taste and 
> that I find obnoxious and wrong.
> 
> JMO,
> 
> Alla
>

bboyminn:

In that moment, the students are lined up to greet newcomers,
foreigners, to the school. In that situation, the students are 
representing the school, and as such, McGonagall has the right
to suppress anything she thinks represents the school poorly.

I don't know about now, but in the past, English schools
were positively and fanatically obsessed with school uniforms.
Even when you were out of school on your own time, you were
still expected to wear your school uniform and to wear it
properly. Even the slightest infraction out of school would 
result in punishment in school.

McGonagall's actions seem mild compared to the fanaticism in
real English schools. 

Just a thought.

Steve/bboyminn




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sat May 23 03:10:45 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 03:10:45 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20
Message-ID: <gv7pfl+vicp@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186714

"Sorry," said Ron wrenching Harry back out of the brambles, "but the name's been jinxed, Harry, that's how they track people! Using his name breaks protective enchantments, it causes some sort of magical disturbance - it's how they found us in Tottenham Court Road!"
'Because we used his name?"
"Exactly! You've got to give them credit, it makes sense" - p.316


Alla:

You know, upon reread I am actually scratching my head about it, but let's see if I can explain coherently why.

I mean, isn't it sort of a symbolic moment when Dumbledore tells Harry to say Voldemort and gives him that famous line about fear of the name only increasing fear of the person?

So I am wondering isn't this moment sort of negates that earlier symbolism?

The reason I feel that way is because now anybody who is going to say the name will basically be sort of suicidal, no? I mean, of course I am not saying that it is BAD to try and escape trace, but now the symbolic standing up to the tyrant is sort of not possible, unless you are an idiot?

Does it make sense?


"That's go to be Luna's house, who else would live in the place like that? It looks like a giant rook!"
It is nothing like a bird," said Hermione, frowning at the tower.
I was talking about chess rook," said Ron. "A castle to you." - p.323

Alla:

So I guess this is the only reminder we get that Ron actually knows chess, huh. 


"Barely ten seconds passed, the the door was flung open and there stood Xenophilius LOvegood, barefooted and wearing what appeared to be a stained nightshirt. His long, white, candyflowss hair was dirty and unkempt. Xenophilius had been positively dapper at Bill and Fleur"s wedding by comparison" - p.323

Alla:

So narrator is already sort of clued in that something is wrong. Why are they still here?

"Harry had the impression that he was undergoing some painful internal struggle" - p.324

Alla:

And they are still here.




From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Sat May 23 15:51:58 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 15:51:58 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gv7pfl+vicp@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv962u+aifq@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186715

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
>
> "Sorry," said Ron wrenching Harry back out of the brambles, 
> "but the name's been jinxed, Harry, that's how they track
> people!..." ... - p.316
> 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> You know, upon reread I am actually scratching my head about 
> it, but let's see if I can explain coherently why.
> 
> I mean, isn't it sort of a symbolic moment when Dumbledore 
> tells Harry to say Voldemort ...
> 
> So I am wondering isn't this moment sort of negates that 
> earlier symbolism?
> 
> The reason I feel that way is because now anybody who is going
> to say the name will basically be sort of suicidal, no? ...now
> the symbolic standing up to the tyrant is sort of not possible,
> unless you are an idiot?
> 
> ...
> 

bboyminn:

There is a difference between being brave and being foolhardy.
Harry doesn't fear Voldemort's name, he has no problem with 
saying it, and even does so later at a most inopportune 
moment. Thereby calling the Snatchers down on them. 

But, he does so accidentally. It would be foolhardy and stupid
in the extreme to use the name knowing that it bring a certain
and very real doom upon you. 

Harry doesn't fear the name, not at all, but he reasonably
fears the very real consequences of speaking the name at 
that time and place.


> Alla continues:
> 
> "That's go to be Luna's house, who else would live in the 
> place like that? It looks like a giant rook!"
>
> "It is nothing like a bird," said Hermione, frowning at the
> tower.
>
> "I was talking about chess rook," said Ron. "A castle to you."
>  - p.323
> 
> Alla:
> 
> So I guess this is the only reminder we get that Ron actually
> knows chess, huh. 
> 

bboyminn:

I think this was one of those little cute side comments intended
to bring both humor and understanding. It is nice to see Ron
correcting Hermione for a change, and it is nice that JKR
clarifies what the house looks like without making it too 
obvious. 

Having dabbled in chess when I was younger, I saw the imagry
in the description of the house before either Ron or Hermione
mentioned, but Ron having mentioned it, solidified the vision
in my mind. A very quick, concise, and compact way to bring to
the minds of the readers a mental vision of the house. The 
most explanation with the few number of words. That's one of
the things I like about JKR. 

> Alla continues:
> 
> "Barely ten seconds passed, the the door was flung open and 
> there stood Xenophilius LOvegood, barefooted and wearing what
> appeared to be a stained nightshirt. His long, white, 
> candyfloss hair was dirty and unkempt. Xenophilius had been
> positively dapper at Bill and Fleur"s wedding by comparison" 
> - p.323
> 
> Alla:
> 
> So narrator is already sort of clued in that something is wrong.
> Why are they still here?
> 
> "Harry had the impression that he was undergoing some painful internal struggle" - p.324
> 
> Alla:
> 
> And they are still here.
>

bboyminn:

Yes, something is wrong, but at that time in history, everything
is always wrong. Why would this be any different? By that I
mean, people are being killed and disappearing left, right, and
center. Lovegood had been encouraging people to support Harry, 
so he was not really high on the Death Eaters popularity list
at the moment. Then Harry Potter and the gang show up at his
door, supporter or not, that is certainly cause to worry.

Now JKR is laying other clues as the scene unfolds, and gradually
Harry starts to realize, not that Lovegood is flustered, but 
WHY he is flustered. Lovegoods disheveled appearance is only
the first of may clues that JKR lays for Harry, and for us the
readers.

Now we the reader, can see all this clearly in hindsight, but
in the moment, while I'm sure Harry is certainly puzzled, he
doesn't have enough information to put it all together and reach 
the correct conclusion. A conclusion that he does eventually
reach, though a little too late. 

Just finished reading "Deathly Hallows" again, and am now about
80% through "Half-Blood Prince". They still hold together as
fantastic stories, even after all this time and many readings. 

Steve/bboyminn




From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Sat May 23 17:11:56 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 17:11:56 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv6hhn+mbvo@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv9aos+7ncp@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186716

"a_svirn" <a_svirn at ...> wrote:
>
> > Shaun:
> > And the fact that Professor McGonagall chooses to reprimand a student on a 
> > formal occasion for having something inappropriate in her hair, suggests 
> > that Hogwarts does have such rules. Does it prove it? No, it doesn't. But if 
> > people are going to base a case for attacking a teacher as having done 
> > something inappropriate, then in my view the burden of evidence should be on 
> > them to prove it wasn't something the teacher was allowed to do under the 
> > school rules - 
> 
> a_svirn:
> I fail entirely to see how it is my burden. Neither narrator, nor McGonagall herself says anything about any rules Parvati allegedly violated. Nowhere in the books are hairstyle regulations mentioned. You are the one who makes this claim, and the only thing you've come up with by way of supporting it is your own real life experience. Which, of course, cannot be convincingly cited as "proof" of anything Hogwarts-related. Sorry, but that burden is all yours. 
>
Steve replies:
     I fail entirely to see why it isn't your burden. You are the one insisting that McG is to blame for scolding a student. That puts the blame squarely on McG and away from Parvati. At least Shaun has come up w/ credible and believable and logical real life school rules for his credible and logical reasons for giving McG reasonable doubt for having a reasonable rationale for scolding Parvati.  What are you basing your insistance that Parvati is innocent on? As far as I can tell, it's simply your subjective wish for her to be so and your subjective wish for McG to be blamed for something wrong. And unless you have tangible proof that Pavarti was not breaking a school rule or not acting inappropriately during a very special public occasion like meeting the students of another school in a formal environment, then the burden of proof for your assertion is on you, as a reasonable person is going to believe that a teacher like McG is acting with some justification and not out of spite or for some other selfish reason.  We live in a society where if you are going to accuse someone of doing wrong, the burden of proof is on you to prove that the wrong was done.  You haven't done so and with all due respect, whether you fail to see that or not, it doesn't change the fact that you haven't done so. 
 
> > Shaun:
> > The position that Professor McGonagall is doing something inappropriate in 
> > this case is founded upon an assumption that she could not possibly be 
> > enforcing a rule. The position that she might be acting entirely 
> > appropriately on the other hand is merely founded upon an assumption that 
> > maybe Hogwarts has a rule that is quite typical and exists in many schools.
> 
> a_svirn:
> "Assumption" being the operative word here. Your assumption seems to be that if she does it then it's OK, because she is a teacher. Neither my real-life experience, nor my knowledge about Hogwarts teachers en masse and McGonagall in particular leads me to assume anything of the sort. 
> 
> 
Steve replies:

And your "assumption" is that if McGonagall reprimands Pavarti w/o sufficient justification, and because there is some ambiguity or confusion or question about exactly what rule (if any) is being broken, then NO such rule must exist and it's not ok for McG to scold Pavarti for some unknown personal assumption that you have made. Shaun has provided several real life examples of rules for such behavior as existing and has made reasonable assumptions based on those rules. And Shaun has rightly stated that whether or not a rule actually exists at Hogwarts about hair ornaments or whatever, that it's also a matter of Pavarti's decorum and behavior at a public event that is involved here. McG wants the students to look like responsible, well behaved, and appropriately groomed students so as to present a respectible representation to the visiting students and staff of Hogwarts. 

 McGonagall is seen throughout the books as being strict but fair. That's how I see her and I would be shocked if a majority of readers saw her otherwise. If you don't want to see her that way, ok fine, ok good. But coming from a another teacher and educator, until you actually prove otherwise, I'm going to believe McG meant well and was well within her rights to do what she did.  And to be perfectly honest, it's good for students to have adults, parents and teachers give them feedback on what they think is appropriate behavior. As an adolescent counselor, it's been my experience that teens are a lot more resilient than you seem to be giving them credit for here.  If a boy that Parvati liked scolded her, it would be something different entirely than having McG do it.

> > Shaun:
> > This isn't a criminal trial, but in law, a person is considered innocent 
> > unless proven guilty. 
> 
> a_svirn:
> Someone should have explained it to McGonagall ? she's rather an off-with-his-head type. 
>

Steve replies:  No one needed to explain it to McGonagall.  Where in canon does another teacher or superior scold her for doing anything harmful to a student?  Other than Umbridge, who's at least borderline psychotic, I can't remember another teacher 2nd guessing McGonagall about anything? And her being an "off-with-his-head type is your perception or misperception IMNSVHO. Where in canon does anyone ever say she is an off with his head type?





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sat May 23 17:30:00 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 17:30:00 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv9aos+7ncp@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv9bqo+mh5b@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186717

Steve replies:
I fail entirely to see why it isn't your burden. You are the one insisting
that McG is to blame for scolding a student. That puts the blame squarely on McG
and away from Parvati. At least Shaun has come up w/ credible and believable and
logical real life school rules for his credible and logical reasons for giving
McG reasonable doubt for having a reasonable rationale for scolding Parvati. 
What are you basing your insistence that Parvati is innocent on? As far as I can
tell, it's simply your subjective wish for her to be so and your subjective wish
for McG to be blamed for something wrong. <SNIP>


Alla:

I  cannot speak for a_svirn but I am basing my insistence of McGonagall being wrong here on a very simple reason that hairstyle regulations are just not mentioned in the book.  Not once. Shaun could have cited the examples from hundred real life schools but they are not Hogwarts. It is to me as simple as that. They are not Hogwarts. Is Hogwarts based in some ways or in many ways on British boarding school system? Of course it is, nobody is denying that. But to say that just because some rules exist in real life schools it is a strong support for something existing in Hogwarts, well,  even if there is some real life basis for something in the books in general, it is still not canon.

Hogwarts had werewolf teacher at some point in time, does that mean that we have werewolf teachers in British public schools?

British public schools do not have Quidditch, do they not? And the list of examples that I can give of the things existing in Hogwarts and not in any British public school can go on and on.

We were treated to quite a few ridiculous degrees by Dolores Dear in OOP. Granted, OOP is the book I know the worst, but if somebody can tell me that one of those degrees regulates hairstyles I will be very surprised. 

So that is what I am basing my insistence that Parvati is innocent in this occasion. I find the wording that McGonagall gives her very specifically phrased in a way that has nothing to do with the rules and everything to do with McGonagall considering her looking ridiculous. 

Let's take the example that Shaun brought up before? Remember Snape confiscating a book from Harry? When Harry was reading while sitting with his friends outside. Would you consider even for one second that Hogwarts has a rule **against reading books in the company of your two friends outside**. Whether or not Ron would have said anything, I did not need him to.

I thought this was absurd. No rule like that was mentioned before or ever after when Hermione was reading books in different places.

For the same reason I find McGonagall here be guilty and Parvati innocent.

If canon mentioned such a rule, I would definitely think that to argue that such rule does not exist would be my burden. Otherwise since there is no such a mention, I think that the additional *canon* support should be given by anyone who claims that such rule exist. 

JMO,

Alla





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sat May 23 17:58:34 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 17:58:34 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gv962u+aifq@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv9dga+mk86@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186718

bboyminn:

There is a difference between being brave and being foolhardy.
Harry doesn't fear Voldemort's name, he has no problem with
saying it, and even does so later at a most inopportune
moment. Thereby calling the Snatchers down on them.

But, he does so accidentally. It would be foolhardy and stupid
in the extreme to use the name knowing that it bring a certain
and very real doom upon you.

Harry doesn't fear the name, not at all, but he reasonably
fears the very real consequences of speaking the name at
that time and place.

Alla:

Well yes, from within the story I do not really disagree with anything wrote here, it is not quite what I meant though. I mean, the fact that if Harry will say Voldemort's name now he will be foolhardy instead of brave, is my point.

I am just trying to figure out how these two moments mesh together in terms of symbolism and to me they really don't, to me they sort of cross each other out.

I thought that initially when Dumbledore was teaching Harry that, it was a moment of heroism, NOT foolhardiness and I thought that it is the moment that author wants her characters to follow, you know?

I was thinking that maybe eventually everybody will say Voldemort's name without fear and that somehow will play up in the moment of victory. 

But now what we are having is the fact that unless one is idiot, he should not say the name, you know?

I guess I am wondering why this moment was needed in the first place.


bboyminn:
<SNIP>
Now we the reader, can see all this clearly in hindsight, but
in the moment, while I'm sure Harry is certainly puzzled, he
doesn't have enough information to put it all together and reach
the correct conclusion. A conclusion that he does eventually
reach, though a little too late.

Alla:

Well, sure however what I am saying is how many clues are necessary for Harry to be clued in before the danger really hits and he gets it?

I mean sure it is needed for the story, but as you said narrator increases the feeling that something wrong consistently through the whole visit ? it is his unkempt appearance first, it is his unwillingness to let them in at first, it is narrator observing Xeno having painful struggle, etc.

Nothing, they do nothing. I mean, here I can at least I understand that they may want to give Luna's father benefit of the doubt before they do anything, but nothing to me would explain Harry doing nothing when he hears hold him when they met Batilda!Snakey.

bboyminn:
Just finished reading "Deathly Hallows" again, and am now about
80% through "Half-Blood Prince". They still hold together as
fantastic stories, even after all this time and many readings.

Alla:

Agreed.





From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Sat May 23 20:53:17 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 20:53:17 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv9aos+7ncp@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv9nnt+lg4u@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186719

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "mesmer44" <winterfell7 at ...> wrote:
>
> "a_svirn" <a_svirn@> wrote:
> >
> > > Shaun:
> > > And the fact that Professor McGonagall chooses to reprimand a student on a 
> > > formal occasion for having something inappropriate in her hair, suggests 
> > > that Hogwarts does have such rules. Does it prove it? No, it doesn't. But if 
> > > people are going to base a case for attacking a teacher as having done 
> > > something inappropriate, then in my view the burden of evidence should be on 
> > > them to prove it wasn't something the teacher was allowed to do under the 
> > > school rules - 
> > 
> > a_svirn:
> > I fail entirely to see how it is my burden. Neither narrator, nor McGonagall herself says anything about any rules Parvati allegedly violated. Nowhere in the books are hairstyle regulations mentioned. You are the one who makes this claim, and the only thing you've come up with by way of supporting it is your own real life experience. Which, of course, cannot be convincingly cited as "proof" of anything Hogwarts-related. Sorry, but that burden is all yours. 
> >
> Steve replies:
>      I fail entirely to see why it isn't your burden. You are the one insisting that McG is to blame for scolding a student. That puts the blame squarely on McG and away from Parvati. 

a_svirn:
I do not accuse McGonagall of some sort of criminal offence, only of being petty. But if we are expected to uphold the sacred "innocent until guilty" principle, then those who accuse Parvati of violating an imaginary dress-code must prove their case. No one in the book accused her of breaking any rules; there is not a single mention of any hair-related regulations, instead there are tons of mentions of unusual styles and ornaments that Hogwarts students sport. The presumption of innocence does not concern teachers exclusively, you know. Students have the same rights under the law. If not always under the school rules. 




From hickengruendler at yahoo.de  Sat May 23 21:53:47 2009
From: hickengruendler at yahoo.de (hickengruendler)
Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 21:53:47 -0000
Subject: How important is Hagrid?
In-Reply-To: <gv3g5p+diki@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv9r9b+u033@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186720

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "hagrid_hut" <hagrid_hut at ...> wrote:
>
> Hagrid81 (http://teawithhagrid.blogspot.com):
> 
> Hello everyone!  I've been reading on and off for a few weeks now and thought it be best to just start a new post rather than risk redundancy in another.
> 
> First let me tell you all that I am obsessed with the character Hagrid--not just because he's so loveable, but also because I find that he plays so many different roles in the series: protector, comic relief, tongue-slipper, etc.  He's a hard character to place because he serves so many functions in the story, but none to a degree that it makes the reader feel as if the story couldn't go on without him (like a Dumbledore does).
> 
> So my question is: Where would you all rank Hagrid in order of importance?
> 
> I hope this is not redundant either.
>

Hickengruendler:

Hello and welcome. :-)

I would rank Hagrid as a very important secondary character. Not as important as the Trio, Dumbledore or Voldemort and probably not as important as Snape, but right behind them, about on the same level with characters like Draco or Neville. But I do think, he gets somewhat less important, as the books progress, in spite of his symbolical act at the end of Deathly Hallows, when he carried the supposedy dead Harry. We get the most information about him from PS to GoF and that it gets a bit downwards.

Generally, I think Hagrid's main role is as a connection between the civilisation (symbolized by Hogwarts) and the wildness (symbolized by the Forbidden Forest). Both his ancestry (part human, part magical creature) and his home (a hut right between Hogwarts and the Forest) hint to that.  




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Sat May 23 22:46:12 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 22:46:12 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gv9dga+mk86@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv9ubk+e01t@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186721

 
> Alla:
> 
> Well yes, from within the story I do not really disagree with anything wrote here, it is not quite what I meant though. I mean, the fact that if Harry will say Voldemort's name now he will be foolhardy instead of brave, is my point.
> 
> I am just trying to figure out how these two moments mesh together in terms of symbolism and to me they really don't, to me they sort of cross each other out.
> 
> I thought that initially when Dumbledore was teaching Harry that, it was a moment of heroism, NOT foolhardiness and I thought that it is the moment that author wants her characters to follow, you know?
> 
> I was thinking that maybe eventually everybody will say Voldemort's name without fear and that somehow will play up in the moment of victory. 
> 
> But now what we are having is the fact that unless one is idiot, he should not say the name, you know?
> 
> I guess I am wondering why this moment was needed in the first place.

Pippin:
I think the idea is to show the difference between a superstitious fear and a rational precaution, and also the dangerous power of habits and symbols.  Saying the name had no magical effect whatever until after the Ministry takeover, and Dumbledore encouraged it as a minor act of  defiance against Voldemort. Very few people would actually have the magical strength or the opportunity to battle with Death Eaters, but anyone, even  a child, could say the name. But when Voldemort actually had the power to put a trace on people who said it, the fact that only a few people had ever followed Dumbledore's lead in this made them vulnerable, and they needed to stop saying the name.  

Being able to say the name did not give Harry any special power, beyond impressing people who were afraid to say it and antagonizing DE's. But Harry had unconsciously started to regard his ability to say it as a kind of talisman, IMO, and it became a habit that he found hard to break. 

Pippin




From hagrid_hut at yahoo.com  Sat May 23 22:54:04 2009
From: hagrid_hut at yahoo.com (Jacob Owen)
Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 15:54:04 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: How important is Hagrid?
In-Reply-To: <gv9r9b+u033@eGroups.com>
References: <gv9r9b+u033@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <794599.82495.qm@web59715.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186722





Hickengruendler:

Hello and welcome. :-)

<SNIP>
Generally, I think Hagrid's main role is as a connection between the civilisation (symbolized by Hogwarts) and the wildness (symbolized by the Forbidden Forest). Both his ancestry (part human, part magical creature) and his home (a hut right between Hogwarts and the Forest) hint to that.

hagrid_hut replies:
I agree with you in general, with one caveat: when you say both "civilization" and "human" there is yet another division between muggle and wizard, and Hagrid had a muggle father.? Hagrid is the only character I can think of besides Madame Maxine that has his roots in muggles, wizards, and beasts.
But it's definitely true that when you compare the muggle civilization with the wizard civilization, Hagrid most definitely belongs to the wizard civilization.





From hagrid_hut at yahoo.com  Sat May 23 03:31:17 2009
From: hagrid_hut at yahoo.com (hagrid_hut)
Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 03:31:17 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gv7pfl+vicp@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gv7qm5+sgee@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186723

> Alla:
<SNIP>
>> I mean, isn't it sort of a symbolic moment when Dumbledore tells Harry to say Voldemort and gives him that famous line about fear of the name only increasing fear of the person?
>
> So I am wondering isn't this moment sort of negates that earlier symbolism?
>
> The reason I feel that way is because now anybody who is going to say the name will basically be sort of suicidal, no? I mean, of course I am not saying that it is BAD to try and escape trace, but now the symbolic standing up to the tyrant is sort of not possible, unless you are an idiot?
>
> Does it make sense? <SNIP>

Hagrid_Hut:

In regards to your first quote, I don't agree that it ruins the symbolism  of Dumbledore's advice.  If anything, it reminds us that Dumbledore is no longer there to even give Harry advice, and perhaps he didn't have it all figured out.  But besides this, it seems to up the antee(?)--the cunningness of the move to track his own name shows that Voldemort is not a person to be trifled with, as Ron suggests.

I don't think that not saying the name means that Harry is afraid of Voldemort now.  If there was a point in the advice that DD gave it was that a name is just a name; one could be afraid the thing itself and not the name, but if one is afraid of the name then they must be afraid of the thing.

Also, now there is an actual reasong for not saying Voldemorts name, whereas before the practice was based on mass hysteria.  It is Percy in the first book who tells Harry that DD usually gives a reason for following rules--now there's a reason.




From lizzyben04 at yahoo.com  Sun May 24 14:07:31 2009
From: lizzyben04 at yahoo.com (lizzyben04)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 14:07:31 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gv9ubk+e01t@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvbkb3+n8pc@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186724

 > Pippin:
> I think the idea is to show the difference between a superstitious fear and a rational precaution, and also the dangerous power of habits and symbols.  Saying the name had no magical effect whatever until after the Ministry takeover, and Dumbledore encouraged it as a minor act of  defiance against Voldemort. Very few people would actually have the magical strength or the opportunity to battle with Death Eaters, but anyone, even  a child, could say the name. But when Voldemort actually had the power to put a trace on people who said it, the fact that only a few people had ever followed Dumbledore's lead in this made them vulnerable, and they needed to stop saying the name.  
<snip>

lizzyben:

But was it ever an irrational superstition? This is the magical world, after all, where spoken words can have instantaneous results in the real world. So ultimately, saying "You-Know-Who" wasn't a silly superstition at all, but a rational precaution. And if the "taboo" was a known spell, it seems like DD should have been aware of the potential danger, as almost everyone else seemed to be. 

DD: "All this 'You- Know-Who' nonsense... for eleven years I have been trying to persuade people to call him by his proper name: Voldemort."

But wasn't "Tom Riddle" his proper name, after all? What I think is strange is that Dumbledore insisted on making everyone else call him "Lord Voldemort". But that was the name Tom Riddle had created for *himself*, the self-glorifying, terrifying name he wanted to be known as. Yet Dumbledore himself called him "Tom" - which was a much more effective way of reducing him down to size & taking away the fake persona Riddle had created. When Harry came back from the dead & lost his fear, he also just called him "Riddle." And that may be an interesting bit of symbolism. It's only when he's lost his fear of death that Harry drops "Voldemort" & uses Tom Riddle's "proper name".

But it sort of begs the question - if DD knew that "Lord Voldemort" was really just plain old Tom Riddle, why wouldn't he make that fact known? Why wouldn't he encourage others to use that name, as DD did, instead of the grandiose name Riddle had created? Is it so that DD doesn't fear Voldemort, but everyone else does? To me, it's sort of like as if Harry said something about that jerk Snape, and DD gently insisted that Harry call Snape by his proper name: "The Half-Blood Prince!" 


lizzyben




From drednort at alphalink.com.au  Sun May 24 14:25:32 2009
From: drednort at alphalink.com.au (Shaun Hately)
Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 00:25:32 +1000
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gv6fc8+p8gu@eGroups.com>
References: <gv6fc8+p8gu@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <E94D22400F5242CCB570A0B0FED5D4FB@ShaunPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186725

> Magpie:
> I see that obviously the school could have some rules that aren't
> strictly enforced, or maybe what Luna's doing doesn't break them.
> But since this is fiction the simplest way of looking at it seems
> more useful. Ron doesn't swear to his teachers, and I think the way
> they're expected to speak to teachers is shown in the reactions of
> teachers. Luna's shown casually wearing funky earrings and things
> to class with no reaction and I took it as a sign that that's okay.

Shaun:

I agree that the simplest way of looking at things seems most useful. And I 
agree it's quite likely that Hogwarts has no rules about, say, earrings 
given that Luna wears them to class without apparently being told not to.

But if that's the case, then it's just as true and just as simple to assume 
that Hogwarts does have rules about what students can wear in their hair, 
given that Parvarti is told not to, when she does so.

I think that what students are allowed to wear in their hair is shown in the 
reaction of a teacher.

Magpie:

> But regardless, that's still not the point of what I see in the
> McGonagall scene. It's that McGonagall does have a pattern of
> letting her personal feelings effect the way she disciplines
> people (just as Hermione does). I don't think the GoF scene is
> about McGonagall enforcing a dress code according to any theory of
> teaching, but about showing McGonagall being nervous about making
> a good impression and snapping at Parvati in irritation for looking
> like a flirt. Whether there's an actual dress code is irrelevent.
> Whether she has the right to tell her what to wear matters less
> than how she chooses to do it in this moment imo, if we're talking
> about what's going on with McGonagall and Parvati here.

Shaun:

Sure - that's your point and I understand it and I agree with you to a great 
extent. Even if I'm right and Professor McGonagall is enforcing a valid 
rule, I do agree that her choice of words shows that she also has a personal 
feeling about that particular hair ornament. But the thing is, different 
people are discussing this with different points in mind, I think. Not every 
body has the same focus as you do, and because we've got multiple focuses 
going on here, sometime a point somebody make may illustrate their point 
without referring to the one intended by the person they are responding to.


Yes, I think Professor McGonagall has a personal dislike of that particular 
hairclip. *But* unless there is a rule that actually says it shouldn't be 
worn, I  don't believe she'd tell her to remove it.

I don't like seeing kids wearing baseball caps - but I'd only ever tell a 
student to take one off if I a rule behind me that authorised me to do so 
(and in many schools here I would). I really hate seeing eleven year old 
girls smothered in makeup - but unless there's a rule against it, I'd 
tolerate it. Would I tell them they look ridiculous? That would depend on my 
relationship with them as a teacher.

Magpie:
> Which is a perfectly fine reading imo, unless it removes the
> character moment for McGonagall. If the whole point of that
> moment is to tell us that Hogwarts has a formal dress code
> they use when greeting visitors which disallows hairclips
> (as I said, I'm pretty sure GoF has them wearing hats more
> casually) and McGonagall is just enforcing the rule, then I
> disagree with that reading. Whether or not McGonagall has
> a dress code to back her up seems completely unimportant
> to me. As a teacher she seems to have the authority to to
> give all sorts of random orders to students. Having the
> authority doesn't mean she can't be taking out her nervousness
> on a student by being insulting. I've never made any case
> for McGonagall being out of line because she has no right
> to say what she's saying here based on Hogwarts rules. I'm
> arguing that the moment isn't in there to tell us about
> Hogwarts dress code one way or the other.

Shaun:

*If* the whole point of that particular passage is to give us a 'character 
moment' for McGonagall, then, yes, you might be right. But who says that is 
the point of the passage? Only the author could know for sure (and that is 
if she remembers exactly why she wrote a particular paragraph nearly nearly 
a decade ago). When I read that passage, I didn't read it as providing a 
'character moment' for Professor McGonagall.

Now my reading of it isn't necessarily the one that JKR had in mind either. 
I'd never try and claim it is. But I will just outline what I got out of it, 
and why I think it's just as valid a potential interpretation as the idea 
that it provides a character moment for Professor Minerva McGonagall.

Bear in mind, who the audience of the Harry Potter books really is - they 
are children's books, first and foremost (I know they are not *just* 
children's books - JKR always hoped they'd have a wider appeal - but I am 
saying first and foremost). More specifically, they are British children's 
books (and, yes, they proved to have a much wider appeal of that). 
Therefore, personally, I think it is valid to consider this passage in the 
context of what a British child would get out of it.

Most British children attend schools that have uniforms. Most schools that 
have uniforms set at least some rules with regards to student's hair. Most 
British children would read that passage and assume that a teacher is 
enforcing such a rule - especially when it's a teacher with a reputation for 
strictness. Most British children would be aware that teachers tend to 
become stricter about enforcing rules concerning uniform and appearance when 
a a major event in the life of the school is about to take place.

This is especially reinforced by the fact that in the previous four lines of 
the text, we have had reference to both the students cloaks and to their 
hats - two items of uniform that, even if they are worn more often than we 
are told, are very rarely explicitly mentioned. In the space of four lines, 
both are mentioned and it's in the very next line the matter of the 
butterfly comes up.

To me, the way I read those paragraphs is that they emphasise that the 
Hogwarts students have been turned out in full kit, the whole school 
assembled, to make the best possible impression on their guests.

I don't read them as being intended to provide a McGonagall moment - I read 
them as being intended to emphasise to the reader the special nature of what 
is about to happen in the life of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and 
Wizardry - and to emphasise it in a way that a great many of the books 
readers have direct experience of.

Now, to an extent, I read it that way because it's the experience I am 
drawing on myself. When I was 13, I started at a new school - my Hogwarts (I 
say that with some sincerity - one of the first things that appealed to me 
when I first read Philosopher's Stone was that in Harry's reaction to 
Hogwarts, I felt so strongly my own reaction to my school back then - it 
quite literally saved my life to go there, and gave me the first truly happy 
school experience of my life). One thing I had to get used to at this school 
was the fact that it did take uniform a lot more seriously than the school 
I'd ever been too before, and I vividly remember the almost physical impact 
I felt the first time I ever put on my blazer (at the junior school where I 
went at 13, we didn't wear the blazer with summer uniform, except for very 
formal occasions (it became much more routine the following year) so the 
first time I wore it was to a religious service for the entire assembled 
school at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne, and it was incredibly 
powerful to suddenly myself suddenly standing in a sea of 2000 other boys 
wearing it. Other memories - of my tutor chasing me with a comb at the age 
of 17 because of a special event that was about to happen - also come to 
mind.

Now, that's my experience - and it informs my reading of the text, and that 
passage, and I'm not saying it has anything at all necessarily to do with 
what JKR intended to convey when she wrote that passage.

But it seems to me to be a passage that talks about uniform and appearence, 
quite explicitly. No, I don't think it's there to tell us about the 'dress 
code.' But I do think it's very likely that it's intended to use that 'dress 
code' and concepts that are quite familiar to many British children reading 
the book (the requirement to be in good order on special occasions at 
school) to emphasises that is not a normal day at Hogwarts.

Go back four or five pages to where Professor McGonagall tells Neville not 
to reveal he can't cast a simple switching spell on someone from Durmstrang. 
That one, I agree shows how tense she is as its primary purpose. But I don't 
see it in this paragrap.

You are correct, by the way, the Goblet of Fire does show a student wearing 
a hat in class (Parvarti in a Charms class), but that doesn't mean they are 
still not a special item of clothing. At my school, our blazers only 
*needed* to be worn under particular conditions (as outer wear if you were 
wearing a jumper outside the gates, at assemblies and other formal 
occasions) but many of us wore them more often in winter. We *could* wear 
them as a choice most of the time. We *had* to wear them for formal events. 
Hogwarts hats and cloaks seem similar to me - they are part of the full 
formal uniform, not required but permitted on other occasions.

Magpie:
> It seems like you're arguing technicalities about rules when I'm
> talking about what it's showing about the character. When I said
> it was McGonagall "breaking the rules" I wasn't trying to claim
> that she was breaking rules imposed on *her* by not punishing
> Harry. I was pointing out that obviously McGonagall does not think
> it's so important that she enforce the no brooms for freshman or
> no flying while the teacher is away or no first years playing
> Quidditch rules when she gets something out of it. I think that's
> what everyone meant when they brought it up. I'm not creating an
> imaginary teacher's handbook and finding McGonagall in violation of it.

Shaun:

I am arguing technicalities about rules, yes, because such things matter to 
the points I am trying to make. They may not matter at all to the points you 
are trying to make. But in my view, when you're talking about the character 
of a 'strict' teacher, the rules that that teacher is functioning in are not 
just technicalities, but are highly important.

You use the term 'freshman' in this paragraph, and I think that illustrates 
part of the reason why I am focusing on this. It's an American term applied 
in American education. It's a cultural construct that would very possibly be 
relevant in any discussion of a school story set in the United States and 
which Americans would understand far more instinctively without any need for 
it to be debated or discussed in comparison to those of us from other 
educational cultures.


Well, for readers coming from a British perspective (and though I'm 
Australian, the education system I grew up in was heavily influenced by that 
of England, and I'm also extremely well read on British education), matters 
relating to uniforms are just as much a cultural construct that are very 
possibly relevant to any discussion of a school story set in Britain) and 
which we would tend to understand far more instinctively than Americans 
would. I actually take a keen interest in American education (although I 
don't understand it anywhere near as well as either Australian or British) 
and have followed quite a few debates about school uniform in American 
education. I actually find them quite amusing *because* of the significant 
disconnects between how Americans seem to see this issue, and the attitudes 
I am used to.

As for Professor McGonagall not thinking some rules are particularly 
important, I agree - there are rules she is clearly willing to bend at 
times.

And my reading of this long discussion is that there are some people posting 
here who *do* think McGonagall was doing something she shouldn't have with 
regards to Parvarti and are using this incident to criticise her, not just 
discuss what it tells us about her character. And that's fine - but I 
disagree with them, and I'm saying why I do.

Magpie:
> Wow. If I was a kid in that school who said McGonagall broke the no brooms
> for first years rule for Harry and some teacher told me that no, she only
> bent the rules, I'd just take that as proof that the teachers weren't fair
> and I shouldn't expect them to be.

Shaun:

Whereas I, as somebody who as a boy attended a school with some very strict 
rules, and who saw some of them bent on occasion and had the reasons 
explained as to why it happened, see this as, in fact, teachers acting 
fairly, and dealing with the reality that a rule that works in 99% of cases, 
doesn't necessarily work in 100% of cases.

We had a rule against wearing earrings - one boy in the entire school was 
allowed to break it - because for him - and only for him - not allowing him 
an exemption would have put a potentially lucrative future career at risk. 
He was - and remains - a professional actor. There was a rule that required 
all students to stay at school until 5.30pm training for sport twice a week. 
I was, for a time, the only student in close to a century to be exempted 
from that rule - because I was the only day boy who lived more than two 
hours away from the school in an area where public transport ended at 7pm. 
There might have been some people who thought these exemptions were unfair - 
but most people understood there were reasons behind them.

Magpie:
> It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I thought this thread was
> originally about what McGonagall humiliating Neville and insulting
> Parvati because she found that emotionally satisfying--just as
> Snape does when he humiliates and insults students.

Shaun:

That seemed to be one of the points being made yes - and I disagree with it. 
I don't believe Professor McGonagall humiliated Neville or insults Parvarti 
because she finds it emotionally satisfying. I think what she does to 
Neville is intended as discipline - she's angry, she has a reason to be 
angry, and she sees no reason why the student responsible for her anger 
should be spared it. She wants to correct their behaviour. I also don't 
particularly feel she insults Parvarti - not if she is enforcing a valid 
rule - a student who has broken a rule deserves to be made to feel bad about 
it - though I agree she does let her personal view show.

Magpie:
> I agree. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with McGonagall
> or Snape showing their students how they feel. But I don't think
> McGonagall's moments of taking her anger out on students are
> always positive or for the student's benefit. In your case, you
> actually did something mean to another person. Neville's losing
> the passwords understandably made her angry, but I don't think her
> continued humiliation punishment did him or anyone any good. And I
> don't see what her snapping at Parvati did for her. In the case
> with Neville she was afraid due to danger so there'd be a reason for
> her to want to shake sense into Neville, much as your teacher would see
> a reason to shake sense into you about being cruel to others. Her anger
> at Parvati seems just catty and personal and momentary.

Shaun:

I agree that Professor McGonagall's anger probably did more harm to Neville 
than good. But that is because Neville is a somewhat special case - he's 
unusually sensitive to such things. I would *not* condone Professor 
McGonagall deliberately and knowingly directing a statement of the type she 
delivered at Neville, to him, if she had known he was the one who was 
responsible. The problem is that she didn't know it was him.

It could have been any one of seventy students (on the size numbers for the 
school and House I find most persuasive) - and sixty nine of those students 
aren't Neville Longbottom.

Her response and her anger is very likely a good response for the majority 
of the students in front of her. Unfortunately, in this case, the poor bunny 
who is responsible isn't one of them - and she doesn't know it.

The trouble is you can't base how you teach (and by 'teach' in this case, I 
mean the whole kit and kaboodle of being a teacher) on aiming at the lowest 
common denominator. Sixty nine other students don't deserve to have the way 
their teacher relates to them decided by Neville Longbottom. There's a time 
for an individualised approach - but it's not when you have seventy students 
in front of them, one of whom has put everybody else at risk, and you don't 
know which one is which.

With Parvarti, though, it's much more straightforward. Assuming that 
Professor McGonagall is enforcing a genuine rule, making a 14 year old girl 
who is deliberately and knowingly breaking that rule out of a desire to 
elevate herself above her peers (to make herself appear more cool or 
prettier or whatever the aim is - I've never been a teenage girl!) feel 
embarassed and silly is a pretty effective way to deal with the situation.

I'm also really not sure what to make of the idea that Professor McGonagall 
engaged in 'continued humiliation' punishment of Neville. As I've said a 
couple of times, I think his punishment was more severe than it needed to 
be - detention and loss of Hogsmeade visits - one of those would have been 
enough in my view. But I've no argument whatsoever with him not being given 
the passwords again - it's just too dangerous for him to be trusted with 
them in that situation.

Magpie:
> No, she was insulted. McGonagall was focused on how she wanted
> her students to come across, got angry that Parvati was the
> flirty girl she always was trying to make a different sort of
> impression, and snapped at her that she looked ridiculous.
> Just as Snape doesn't punish Hermione in the "I see no
> difference" scene, he just insults her.

Shaun:

Totally different situation in my view. Hermione had done *nothing* wrong in 
that scene. Quite the contrary in fact, she had tried to prevent Harry doing 
something he shouldn't. In no way, could his comment be seen as justified by 
anything.

>> Shaun:
>>
>> If I tell a student to stop swearing, I don't generally feel the need to
>> remind him it's against the rules. He knows it's against the rules. That
>> doesn't need to be said. I *might* mention the rules if I believe there's 
>> a
>> reason why he might not know about that particular rule, but generally
>> speaking I wouldn't mention that at all. I assume students know the 
>> rules.
>
> Magpie:
> Do you feel the need to make a personal comment about him in general
> that's got nothing to do with swearing? If so, are you doing that to
> objectively enforce the rules or do you just find the kid irritating
> and want him to know that?

Shaun:

First of all, Professor McGonagall's comment does have something to do with 
Parvarti's rule breaking (if it is a rule, of course). She's commenting on 
the object that is being used to break the rules. She doesn't call Parvarti 
ridiculous - she calls the butterfly ridiculous. It's not quite the same 
thing.

But would I make a personal comment about a student while disciplining him 
for swearing? Yes, on occasion, I would.

"Simon, you're disgusting. I never want to hear you say something like that 
again."

Would I be doing it to objectively enforce the rules or because I find him 
irritating? A little from column a, and a little from column b. As I've 
said, I don't see anything wrong with a teacher letting their feelings show 
while disciplining a student - as long as it doesn't lead to the student 
being punished more severely than they deserve.

Magpie:
> The automoton idea is a strawman--neither of us expects the teachers
> to do that.

Shaun:

You don't and I don't - but I think some people do. They want Professor 
McGonagall to have not shown any sign of anger or irritation or any emotion 
at all in disciplining Neville and Parvarti. Or, to be fair, they probably 
don't want her to show *negative* emotion - I doubt anybody seriously thinks 
teachers shouldn't show warmth and kindness and things like that.

That's quite a common position - a lot of people seem to think (and more 
important seem to think that there's some sort of 'rule' or 'evidence' or 
'theory' or 'policy') that teachers should always be nice and kind and 
fluffy and comfortable - and never say anything negative, never raise their 
voices, never reprimand a child, never do anything that might upset a 
child... it's a Mary Poppins idea.

"If you want this choice position
Have a cheery disposition
Rosy cheeks, no warts,
Play games, all sorts.
You must be kind, you must be witty
Very sweet and fairly pretty
Take us on outings, give us treats
Sing songs, bring sweets
Never be cross or cruel
Never feed us castor oil, or gruel
Love as a son and daughter
And never smell of barley water
If you won't scold and dominate us
We will never give you cause to hate us
We won't hide your spectacles so you can't see
Put toads in your bed, or pepper in your tea"

A lot of people - that's their image of what a teacher should be nowadays. 
It's all very nice. But it's not really all that good an idea. The evidence 
is, substantially, that it doesn't work for kids. It's not in their best 
interests at all.

Nor should all teachers be at the other extreme. But the point is - and it's 
a real problem in modern education - too many people seem to think that it's 
never acceptable for a teacher to show any feeling towards a child that the 
child doesn't like. That you should never raise your voice. That you should 
never scold, never reprimand, and certainly never ever be angry.

There is nothing wrong with a teacher being angry at a child who has done 
something to deserve it. There is nothing wrong with a teacher reprimanding 
a child who deserves it, even if it's done in a way that the child finds a 
bit embarassing. A teacher is not automatically doing something wrong when 
they do these things.

Being emotional is part of being a teacher. Kids need to know that you 
actually care about them, and that you care about what they do. And that 
means they need to know when they've disappointed you or angered you, just 
as much as they need to know when they've made you proud, or made you happy.

The balance is going to be different for different teachers. That's more a 
matter of style than anything else.

Magpie:
> The thread was not, as I understood it, ever really
> supposed to be about whether Hogwarts had rules about
> hair clips

Shaun:

Ah! But for some of us, that may actually be an interesting question that is 
well worth discussing. OK, maybe not, but I for one do find trying to fit 
Hogwarts into the context of real schools very interesting.

Magpie:

>, a fact that doesn't exist one way or the other. I thought
> it started with a_svirn pointing out that there seemed to
> be different judgments made on Snape and McGonagall when
> they behaved in similar ways, based on the idea that Snape
> was a sadist at heart, so when he humiliated or insulted
> students or enforced the rules according to his desires
> it was a sign of his inner sadism and unfairness, while
> McGonagall was a good person so when she did these things
> it wasn't a sign of inner sadism or unfairness like Snape's.

Shaun:

Yes, but the point is whether or not they are actually enforcing genuine 
rules - or just engaging in their own whims - is highly relevant to that.

To an extent, I will often defend Professor Snape - sometimes when nobody 
else will - because as I've said, I had some teachers very like him who I 
regard as very good teachers, very effective ones. But I think there is a 
very real difference between Snape and McGonagall.

I don't think Snape is a sadist, personally (and, for the record, yes, I did 
have at least one teacher who was) but he definitely allows his feelings to 
overwhelm what he *should* be doing as a teacher sometimes, especially when 
it comes to Harry. I've never seen a clear cut case of Professor McGonagall 
doing that - and when the cases other people point out seem to me to be ones 
that can easily be explained by simply assuming normal school rules, 
commonplace in many schools, apply at Hogwarts, then I think it's highly 
relevant to point this out.

If you want to talk about defending the indefensible - or coming close to 
it - I could even make a reasonable case in my own mind at least for 
defending Umbridge's quill. Objectively speaking, used in moderation, I 
doubt it was any worse than the canings I received at school. Of course, she 
used it to an extent that could not be described as in moderation, and she 
used it on an innocent boy (which she may not have known) even after it 
clearly wasn't working (which she should have known), but the point is, 
rules do matter in deciding whether or not a teacher acted inappropriately. 
In the real world, I would *never* defend a teacher who hit a kid in a 
school where it wasn't allowed - yet, personally, I believe corporal 
punishment should be legal. For that matter, even though as I've made it 
quite clear above, I believe it is both appropriate and in the best 
interests of children for teachers to show their anger at times, I would 
report in an instant any teacher who yelled at a child in a school where 
that wasn't allowed. It isn't as simple as whether or not something is legal 
or illegal (just because something is legal doesn't automatically mean it's 
justifiable - but if it's illegal, it can't be justified at all. So the 
rules do matter.)


a_svirn:
> I fail entirely to see how it is my burden. Neither narrator, nor
> McGonagall herself says anything about any rules Parvati
> allegedly violated. Nowhere in the books are hairstyle regulations
> mentioned. You are the one who makes this claim, and the only thing
> you've come up with by way of supporting it is your own real life
> experience. Which, of course, cannot be convincingly cited as "proof"
> of anything Hogwarts-related. Sorry, but that burden is all yours.

Shaun:

Sorry - but this is simply isn't the case. My own real life experience is 
self-evidently not the only thing I've come up with. Quite the contrary. 
I've posted about one and a thousand words of regulations from real schools, 
clearly showing that the type of rule I am talking about is quite common in 
British schools.

You don't have to accept that as proof of anything, but, please don't try 
and pretend it doesn't exist.

My point in doing that is I am simply arguing that there is a good chance 
that Hogwarts has a rule that is common in British schools, just as it is 
obvious to anyone who is familiar with such schools that Hogwarts shares a 
great many of their characteristics. And more importantly that assuming such 
a rule does not exist as a reason for claiming a teacher has done the wrong 
thing seems to me to be drawing rather a long bow.

It is clear that earlier in this discussion, you were under the mistaken 
impression that such a rule isn't one that a school in Britain could 
possibly reasonably have. You said this:

"Approved sort of hair clasp?! What is it, North Korea? I don't believe even 
Umbridge could be bothered to regulate hair clasps."

Your position seems to me to have been based - in part, not in total - on a 
mistaken idea about what schools outside of totalitarian regimes could 
possibly be bothered to regulate.

Even after it has been clearly demonstrated that there are schools in 
Britain that *do* bother to regulate such matters - you do not seem to have 
modified your position at all.

This is why I refer to the burden of proof. It seems to me that your 
position isn't based on 'proof' at all. It's based on the way you think 
Hogwarts should be run, and it doesn't matter what evidence somebody else 
shows you, you won't modify your position.

OK, that's fine. We're talking about a work of fiction here, and a person's 
individual interpretation of a work of fiction is their own business (I find 
certain types of fanfic to be the clearest proof of that) but if you want to 
convince anybody else, then the burden of proof lies with you. If you don't 
care if anyone agrees with you or not - OK.

I choose to believe that Hogwarts must function as a real school, but the 
day to day realities of a real school aren't what JKR's readers want to read 
about (well, OK - I wouldn't mind, but I don't think most people find such 
matters as interesting as I do). But it needs to be consistent in order to 
seem real. And, in my views, Hogwarts does seem consistent enough to be 
real.

And that is because it is modelled on a particular real world *and* literary 
model of schools and, except in those cases where JKR has needed to change 
things in order to make a *magical* school servicing a *magical* community, 
she has stuck to that model. It is the model of the British boarding school, 
as it really exists in British history, and also as it exists in literally 
hundreds of school stories written throughout (mostly) the 19th and 20th 
century.

These are her model - and I think it's reasonable to assume in any case 
where we don't know otherwise - that Hogwarts is in general conformity with 
that model.

Two relevant facts about that model.

(1) Most of the schools that fit that model have uniforms.

(2) Most of the schools that fit that model set at least some rules on hair.

Do we know Hogwarts does this? No, but the model - both in the real world 
and literary model - means that the default assumption that it does have 
such rules is significantly more likely than a default assumption that it 
does not.

So when we see a teacher tell a student to fix something that the teacher 
feels is wrong about their hair, it is more likely than not that the teacher 
is enforcing a rule, than that the teacher is just doing something they have 
no right to do.

a_svirn:
> "Assumption" being the operative word here. Your assumption
> seems to be that if she does it then it's OK, because she is a
> teacher. Neither my real-life experience, nor my knowledge about
> Hogwarts teachers en masse and McGonagall in particular leads me
> to assume anything of the sort.

Shaun:

No, my assumption is not that it's OK because she is a teacher. My 
assumption is that it's OK because we see a teacher taking an action that 
would normally be completely acceptable under the rules of a great many 
schools in the country in which the school that that teacher is situated and 
we have no reason whatsoever to think that this school is an exception to 
that rule.

This is further reinforced in my mind by the fact that it's being done by a 
teacher who is described as strict but is normally presented as fair, and 
indeed as being a teacher who has proven willing to publically reprimand a 
colleague (Moody/Crouch in the case of the bouncing ferret) for acting 
outside the accepted disciplinary practices of the school, and further by 
the fact that she does it in public in clear view of her own colleagues and 
a large number of students.

It is true, that all things being equal, I tend to assume a teacher is more 
likely to be acting appropriately than a student. It's not always the case, 
but in general, I do believe that is a more likely assumption. But in this 
case, it's happening publically, it's a perfectly reasonable thing in line 
with real world practice to assume is allowed, the student doesn't protest, 
the teacher has a reputation, she's Deputy Headmistress of the school, so 
even if there wasn't a rule against hair ornaments to begin with, she 
probably could have had one introduced, if she thinks such matters are 
important (as apparently she does) - well, yes, all that adds up to me 
believing fairly strongly, it's probably allowed - but that more 
significantly basing an opinion on the certainty that it couldn't be is 
tenuous at best.

a_svirn:
> Meaning, to some extant it is still reasonable? Could you give one example
> of its relative reasonableness?

Shaun:

Sure.

CAPD doesn't always manifest in exactly the same way. There's a set of about 
eight common characteristics, and if a child has three or more of them, and 
it's obviously negatively impacting their school performance then it can be 
'diagnosed'.

Neville definitely has three of the CAPD characteristics (the three most 
common and indicative ones). There's one he definitely doesn't seem to have 
and one I don't think he has, which leaves three which I can't assess from 
what we know from the books. This illustrates how it doesn't always manifest 
in the same way.

Because it doesn't manifest itself in the same way, not all CAPD children 
will have a problem with something like a password. There are also 
strategies that they can be taught, or in some cases, learn by themselves, 
that allow them to learn passwords (a lot of schools are increasingly 
requiring students to use passwords in computer related activities, so this 
is a real world problem). Neville *could* conceivably learn how to deal with 
this problem, so while it is not entirely reasonable to expect him to, not 
is it completely unreasonable to say that he's incapable of doing this.

The fact that he can remember a term like 'mimbulus mimbletonia' because it 
has meaning to him, illustrates this. Neville shouldn't just be told the 
word 'oddsbodikins' - he needs to know what it means.

a_svirn:
> No, it is not my assumption at all. Neville certainly shares some
> responsibility for the whole password fiasco, but not the whole of it,
> and not even the most of it. My *concern* is that while the entire
> situation is of McGonagall's own making, the only one who's got blamed
> for the whole thing is Neville. This is a classic case of scapegoating:
> when a person of authority abjures any responsibility for her own
> neglect and carelessness and lays the blame squarely on the victim of
> the said neglect.

Shaun:

First of all, I really don't think you've even come close to demonstrating 
that this "entire situation is of McGonagall's own making." Professor 
McGonagall was not responsible for putting Sir Cadogan in place as the 
guardian of Gryffindor Tower - Professor Dumbledore was - and there was no 
other choice. No other painting was willing to take on the role. Secondly, 
as far as I can see, we've got no evidence that Professor McGonagall was 
aware that Neville had problems remembering passwords - he does adequately 
in her class and she feels his main problem is lack of confidence. You seem 
to be assuming that she must be aware of Neville's password issues. Why do 
you assume that?

Let me make something clear here - even in the Muggle world where, in many 
places, most teachers are university trained specifically in education, most 
teachers are not qualified to identify most learning disabilities. And 
that's especially true of teachers at the secondary level. It is reasonable 
to expect a teacher to be aware of issues that arise in their own 
classroom - but the subject Professor McGonagall teaches isn't one that is 
all that likely to show off Neville's memory problems. Kids often manage to 
hide these problems from teachers as well. A teacher should not 
automatically be faulted for not picking them up.

And besides that - I have to say that even taking the broadest possible view 
I can see as possibly justified of Professor McGonagall's "failures" in this 
case - even if we assume she was aware of Neville's problem and did 
*nothing* to deal with it (which would, in my view, be a serious dereliction 
of duty of care by his Head of House), I'd still place the bulk of the blame 
on Neville - for not reporting the loss of the passwords in a timely 
fashion. McGonagall's "failure" if it does exist is in not helping Neville 
to find an alternative way of dealing with the problem. That doesn't have 
any impact on his failure to report the loss of the passwords.

And also - even if Professor McGonagall shares a lot of the responsibility 
for what went wrong in this case, unfortunately, she is the person 
responsible for disciplining Neville. If he deserves to be punished, then he 
deserves to be punished - even if the person who finds themselves in the 
position of having to do it isn't in the best position of moral authority to 
be dealing with this particular breach. I was horribly bullied at the school 
from hell - and the main reason that happened is because teachers stood back 
and let it happen - but while I'd *love* to have seen those teachers pay for 
that, the bullies should still have been punished as well. For their own 
good, and for mine.


Neville is responsible for the things he did, that he could have done 
differently. There's no reason he shouldn't be held accountable for those 
things, even if it's possible somebody else should be held accountable for 
their failures as well.

a_svirn:
> She'd have to suffer from a serious case of a memory loss
> herself, not to be aware of the potencial problem.

Shaun:

Why?

I've mentioned that I have a form of APD. For me, one of the main ways its 
manifests itself is in a near total inability to handle music. My first 
housemaster at school taught me Mathematics and Computer Science - subjects 
I did well in. My second housemaster taught me Religious Education - 
something that again, I did quite well in. My tutor (the teacher most 
responsible for my welfare) taught me English - which again, I did well in.

None of them had any real idea of how awful I was in music, nor any real 
idea of why I was having those problems. They didn't see them as teachers.

Professor McGonagall sees Neville in Transfiguration class. A class in which 
he passes. She sees his difficulties as a lack of confidence.

Teachers aren't omniscient. They can't know about problems they don't see, 
or that nobody tells them about.

a_svirn:
> Didn't know or didn't want to know? Or care?

Shaun:

I think it's quite likely she didn't know.


Shaun:
> > When Professor McGonagall arranged for Hermione to be given a Time 
> > Turner -
> > if Hermione had then chosen to use that Time Turner to rob Honeydukes, 
> > would
> > you be claiming Professor McGonagall bore all the responsibility for 
> > that
> > and Hermione none at all? Somehow I doubt it.

a_svirn:
> So do I. What does it have to do with anything?

Shaun:

Because your position seems to be that because McGonagall might have done 
something that made it possible for Neville to do the wrong thing, that's 
she becomes primarily responsible for him doing the wrong thing. Well, the 
example I've given is one I see as an equivalent situation.

You wouldn't excuse Hermione - so why do you seek to excuse Neville?

If it is simply because he has problems, then that is not in his best 
interests and it's not fair on him or anyone else. If, however, you do see 
the situations as totally different - and maybe you do, and I've just missed 
the reasons - that's another matter entirely.

But even if a teacher does something that enables misbehaviour or allows a 
chance at misbehaviour, it's still the child who decides to do the wrong 
thing.

a_svirn:
> No one says it is. I wasn't talking about Neville's not taking
> proper care of the list. I was saying that Sir Cadogan's passwords
> were beyond his capabilities. As for the list, it was stolen from him
> - can happen to anyone. Point is, McGonagall wilfully ignored and
> callously ridiculed his disability, and when her tactics backfired
> she punished the victim of her bullying - Neville.

Shaun:

Well, I *am* talking about Neville not taking care of the list and much more 
importantly, not reporting it's loss. You seem to me to want to give him a 
free pass on that. I don't believe that's justified.

I don't believe Neville deserves to be punished for writing the passwords 
down. I don't believe he deserves to be punished for their loss (especially 
as they were stolen, but even if he'd lost them, that's a fairly minor 
thing, and I do believe if he'd been taken proper care, he'd have noticed 
the loss earlier). I do believe that the fact that even after he was aware 
that he didn't have a clue where the list had gone that with over two days 
of time available for him to do so, he failed to report the loss, thus 
exposing himself and all his friends to the potential depradations of a 
maniac mass murderer who'd already tried to break in once, that he deserved 
to be punished for that.

I also don't see any proof at all that Professor McGonagall was aware of the 
problem, nor do I see why she should be held responsible for the situation 
of Sir Cadogan's passwords in preference to Professor Dumbledore who is the 
one who made Sir Cadogan the temporary guardian of Gryffindor Tower. If 
anybody is to blame for the password situation, I'd blame Dumbledore over 
McGonagall.

a_svirn:
> So what is the fundamental difference between "breaking" and "bending"?
> If it is a student who does it, then it is breaking, and when it is a
> teacher who does the breaking it is actually "bending"?


Shaun:

No, that's not it.

The difference comes from, in my view, the difference the 'letter of the 
law' and the 'spirit of the law'.

We don't know the precise reasons behind the ban on first years having 
brooms. Not for certain. So it's hard to know for certain what the 'spirit 
of the law' is. But it's my guess that it's a safety rule. Hogwarts does not 
want students flying around on brooms who cannot do so safely. We know from 
Professor Hooch's first lesson that most first year students can't even make 
a broom jump to their hand.

They don't seem to have flying lessons after first year, so presumably 
students learn to fly in that first year.

The most likely reason for the rule does seem to be safety. Protecting 
students is the 'spirit of the law'.

Harry, however, can fly brilliantly, naturally. He's as safe as any other 
student on a broom. Allowing him to have one doesn't violate the spirit of 
the law.

Most schools allow sensible exemptions from rules. They understand that even 
a rule that is right in 99% of cases, might be wrong in 1%. Is it wrong for 
exceptions to be made? I don't think so - and I don't think teachers should 
be judged harshly if they do.

> Alla:
>
> I  cannot speak for a_svirn but I am basing my insistence
> of McGonagall being wrong here on a very simple reason that
> hairstyle regulations are just not mentioned in the book.
> Not once. Shaun could have cited the examples from hundred
> real life schools but they are not Hogwarts. It is to me as
> simple as that. They are not Hogwarts. Is Hogwarts based in
> some ways or in many ways on British boarding school system?
> Of course it is, nobody is denying that. But to say that
> just because some rules exist in real life schools it is a
> strong support for something existing in Hogwarts, well,
>  even if there is some real life basis for something in the
> books in general, it is still not canon.

Shaun:

The point I would make here is that the rules I'm describing are not unusual 
rules. They are typical and normal rules. Most British schoolchildren 
reading the Harry Potter books are going to schools which have uniform rules 
and most of those have rules that concern what is and isn't acceptable with 
regards to hair. Those rules differ from school to school in detail - but 
most British kids are used to the idea that schools can and do impose rules 
on hair of some sort.

This means that a British schoolchild reading that paragraph in Goblet of 
Fire is in all probability going to assume that Professor McGonagall is 
acting under colour of authority and is imposing a rule of a type they 
recognise.

Arguments that are based around the idea that Professor McGonagall is, in 
that paragraph, doing something she shouldn't be doing are based around an 
assumption that JKR would write a sentence into that book that the main 
target audience of the book are intended to interpret in a way that is 
totally at odds with most of their own experiences - and that she doesn't 
bother to point out to the children that Hogwarts rule on this is different 
from the norm.

She has no reason to write that sentence to suggest that McGonagall is doing 
something wrong - because the target audience would not read it that way. To 
me, the sensible assumption is that she wrote the sentence, knowing that the 
children reading the book would assume Professor McGonagall is enforcing a 
rule familiar to them.

A rule they know their own teachers are most likely to enforce on special 
occasions. So therefore, this signals that this is a special occasion. And 
coupled with the fact that in the previous four lines, she's already 
emphasised that they are turned out in full school uniform (mentioning the 
cloaks and hats that she usually ignores), that simply reinforces the same 
basic point.

Alla:

> Hogwarts had werewolf teacher at some point in time, does that
> mean that we have werewolf teachers in British public schools?

Shaun:

It would have explained Mr O'Reilly at my school...

Shaun:

> British public schools do not have Quidditch, do they not? And
> the list of examples that I can give of the things existing in
> Hogwarts and not in any British public school can go on and on.

No, but they do have Rugby and Football (soccer) and the children would 
understand the fanaticism associated with Quidditch because they are used to 
similar fanaticism associated with real sports at school - and especially at 
traditional boarding schools ("Play up, play up, and play the game!") JKR 
routinely draws on children's experience of their schools so they understand 
Hogwarts. When she 'perverts' that understanding, she explains in quite a 
lot of detail that she's doing it.

When we first discover that detentions at Hogwarts aren't like the typical 
detentions at a Muggle school, Hagrid explicitly explains the difference (to 
Draco) .

Alla:
> We were treated to quite a few ridiculous degrees by Dolores
> Dear in OOP. Granted, OOP is the book I know the worst, but if
> somebody can tell me that one of those degrees regulates hairstyles
> I will be very surprised.

Shaun:

I wouldn't be!

Alla:

> Let's take the example that Shaun brought up before? Remember Snape
> confiscating a book from Harry? When Harry was reading while sitting
> with his friends outside. Would you consider even for one second
> that Hogwarts has a rule **against reading books in the company
> of your two friends outside**. Whether or not Ron would have said
> anything, I did not need him to.
>
> I thought this was absurd. No rule like that was mentioned before
> or ever after when Hermione was reading books in different places.

Shaun:

School rules don't always make a whole lot of sense. Especially in 
traditional schools. At my school, there was a particular staircase which 
you were not allowed to step on if a person from a higher form was already 
walking on it. We tried to figure out why the rule existed - best we could 
come up with was that it was some very odd way of limiting how many people 
were on the stairs at a time. On at least one occasion I was late to a class 
because I just couldn't get down that staircase.

Monty Python make fun of these types of things in one of their skits in The 
Meaning of Life - and remember the joke is only really funny because so many 
people watching can relate to it:

"Humphrey: All right, settle down. Settle down... Now, before I begin the 
lesson, will those of you who are playing in the match this afternoon move 
your clothes down onto the lower peg immediately after lunch, before you 
write your letter home, if you're not getting your hair cut, unless you've 
got a younger brother who is going out this weekend as the guest of another 
boy, in which case, collect his note before lunch, put it in your letter 
after you've had your hair cut, and make sure he moves your clothes down 
onto the lower peg for you. Now...
Wymer: Sir?
Humphrey: Yes, Wymer?
Wymer: My younger brother's going out with Dibble this weekend, sir, but I'm 
not having my hair cut today, sir. So, do I move my clothes down, or...
Humphrey: I do wish you'd listen, Wymer. It's perfectly simple. If you're 
not getting your hair cut, you don't have to move your brother's clothes 
down to the lower peg. You simply collect his note before lunch, after 
you've done your scripture prep, when you've written your letter home, 
before rest, move your own clothes onto the lower peg, greet the visitors, 
and report to Mr. Viney that you've had your chit signed."

a_svirn:
> I do not accuse McGonagall of some sort of criminal offence,
> only of being petty. But if we are expected to uphold the sacred
> "innocent until guilty" principle, then those who accuse Parvati
> of violating an imaginary dress-code must prove their case.
> No one in the book accused her of breaking any rules; there is
> not a single mention of any hair-related regulations, instead
> there are tons of mentions of unusual styles and ornaments that
> Hogwarts students sport. The presumption of innocence does not
> concern teachers exclusively, you know. Students have the same
> rights under the law. If not always under the school rules.

Shaun:

Well... no, they don't, actually. Not in most places. Not in most times. 
Schoolchildren very often have far less rights than adults do.

At the time 'Goblet of Fire' is set, according to British law in place at 
the time, Professor McGonagall would have been legally perfectly within her 
rights to beat Parvarti or any other student with a stick. And teachers are 
still not held to any type of standard which even approaches 'innocent until 
proven guilty'.

As for these 'tones of mentions of unusual styles and ornaments that 
Hogwarts students sport', please feel free to cite them. I've spent 
considerable time going through the books over the last few days and with 
the possible exception of Lee's dreadlocks, I can't find a single mention of 
a hairstyle that would be considered unacceptable in the schools I'm most 
familiar with, even though all of them have rules concerning hair, and many 
have rules concerning what girls are allowed to have in their hair.

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia




From sartoris22 at yahoo.com  Sun May 24 14:58:12 2009
From: sartoris22 at yahoo.com (sartoris22)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 14:58:12 -0000
Subject: How important is Hagrid?
In-Reply-To: <gv9r9b+u033@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvbna4+9pk5@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186726

Generally, I think Hagrid's main role is as a connection between the civilisation (symbolized by Hogwarts) and the wildness (symbolized by the Forbidden Forest). Both his ancestry (part human, part magical creature) and his home (a hut right between Hogwarts and the Forest) hint to that. 

sartoris22:

I agree. Hagrid is an important transition figure. He is the first person from the wizard world who we see have meaningful contact with Harry. And the importance of that initial contact, in my opinion, should not be diminished. Harry is esentially an orphan living in a cupboard in the home of horrible relatives. Hagrid enters the scene and almost immediately gives Harry affection and hope. And who could ask for a better protector, despite Hagrid's occasional bumbling? Hagrid would clearly die for Harry, and he must have incredible qualities, if Dumnbledore, arguably the smartest and most skilled wizard, entrusts him to deliver the most important wizard in the world to Hogwarts. I think, in a strange way, Hagrid serves as Haryy's first parental figure, both mother and father. In their first meeting, Hagrid breaks down a door to rescue Harry and brings Harry a birthday cake that he baked himself. And Hagrid's representation of three contingents--muggle,wizard, and magical creature--is, I think, a symbol of an important idea in the book--acceptance and unity. Hagrid also represents self acceptance. Many of the charcters in the novel struggle to accept their background and how it effects their present--Voldemort, Neville, Draco, and Lupin are only a few examples. Hagrid never laments his background, in fact he wants to find the mother who deserted him and eagerly embraces his wild giant half-brother. Hagrid, in some ways, represents the hope of a better world, and if he is a "secondary" character, he is a very essential one.




From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Sun May 24 15:33:57 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 15:33:57 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <E94D22400F5242CCB570A0B0FED5D4FB@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gvbpd5+jmm5@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186727

Shaun:
> I don't read them as being intended to provide a McGonagall moment - I read 
> them as being intended to emphasise to the reader the special nature of what 
> is about to happen in the life of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and 
> Wizardry - and to emphasise it in a way that a great many of the books 
> readers have direct experience of.

Magpie:
I think that's definitely a part of the scene too. I would just say that the McGonagall line, if it's bringing up memories of these kinds of things, not only reminds me of special moments, but reminds me of teachers being insulting. Parvati obviously understood it to be a special moment too. That's why she wore a special hairclip.  
 
 
Shaun:
But I do think it's very likely that it's intended to use that 'dress 
> code' and concepts that are quite familiar to many British children reading 
> the book (the requirement to be in good order on special occasions at 
> school) to emphasises that is not a normal day at Hogwarts.

Magpie:
And surely to show us that Parvati is excited about the new students coming and wants to look pretty and special for them and McGonagall knows that and is annoyed by it.

Shaun:
> 
> Go back four or five pages to where Professor McGonagall tells Neville not 
> to reveal he can't cast a simple switching spell on someone from Durmstrang. 
> That one, I agree shows how tense she is as its primary purpose. But I don't 
> see it in this paragrap.

Magpie:
So you think telling someone the clip they've obviously put on because they think it's pretty makes them look ridiculous is the standard way of telling them they're not complying with the dress code? Why not just say "Take out that hair clip, Patil?" I think JKR's choice of words there is pretty clear.

Shaun:
> 
> You are correct, by the way, the Goblet of Fire does show a student wearing 
> a hat in class (Parvarti in a Charms class), but that doesn't mean they are 
> still not a special item of clothing. 

> Shaun:
 
> Well, for readers coming from a British perspective (and though I'm 
> Australian, the education system I grew up in was heavily influenced by that 
> of England, and I'm also extremely well read on British education), matters 
> relating to uniforms are just as much a cultural construct that are very 
> possibly relevant to any discussion of a school story set in Britain) and 
> which we would tend to understand far more instinctively than Americans 
> would. 

Magpie:
I'm not convinced that the point I was making is different in American schools vs. British and Australian schools. As an American student, I see Harry's not being punished or at least reprimanded for flying in class after the teacher told them not to, her buying him a broom for himself when there was a rule against first years (I misused the word freshman anyway--I forgot that happened first year, so in American schools Harry wouldn't be a freshman until 4th year) having brooms at all and putting him on the Quidditch team when first years aren't allowed to try out for them as special treatment because McGonagall is getting something she wants out of it.

I may not have gone to a boarding school outside the US, but I've seen and read enough about that situation to know that stuff like this is just as familiar to British and Australian students as it is to American ones. Justifications that it was legal by school rules because McGonagall can bend them in certain ways isn't surprising. Of course the people in charge can override a rule when they get something out of it.


> Magpie:
> > Wow. If I was a kid in that school who said McGonagall broke the no brooms
> > for first years rule for Harry and some teacher told me that no, she only
> > bent the rules, I'd just take that as proof that the teachers weren't fair
> > and I shouldn't expect them to be.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Whereas I, as somebody who as a boy attended a school with some very strict 
> rules, and who saw some of them bent on occasion and had the reasons 
> explained as to why it happened, see this as, in fact, teachers acting 
> fairly, and dealing with the reality that a rule that works in 99% of cases, 
> doesn't necessarily work in 100% of cases.

Magpie:
How is the teacher acting "fairly" by buying Harry a broom, exactly? What is it that doesn't work for Harry having to wait until 2nd year to have a broom at school and bring his own rather than having the school buy a top of the line broom for him? This is hardly letting somebody leave early because they live far away. (I don't quite understand why an actor's career is threatened by taking out his earring for a few hours a day, but again, that situation doesn't fit Harry's being given a broom.) McGonagall "bends" the rules for Harry because she wants to beat Slytherin at Quidditch. Understanding why she bent the rules in Harry's case doesn't make it fair. I don't think there's a single student in the book that thinks it's fair. On the contrary, the students who talk about it all pretty much agree it isn't.

I can also give examples from my school where rules were enforced differently for different students and students knew why and found it unfair. That happens too.

> 
> Magpie:
> > It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I thought this thread was
> > originally about what McGonagall humiliating Neville and insulting
> > Parvati because she found that emotionally satisfying--just as
> > Snape does when he humiliates and insults students.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> That seemed to be one of the points being made yes - and I disagree with it. 
> I don't believe Professor McGonagall humiliated Neville or insults Parvarti 
> because she finds it emotionally satisfying. I think what she does to 
> Neville is intended as discipline - she's angry, she has a reason to be 
> angry, and she sees no reason why the student responsible for her anger 
> should be spared it. She wants to correct their behaviour. I also don't 
> particularly feel she insults Parvarti - not if she is enforcing a valid 
> rule - a student who has broken a rule deserves to be made to feel bad about 
> it - though I agree she does let her personal view show.

Magpie:
She's not being made to feel bad about breaking the rule (if one exists, no one in canon ever makes reference to such a rule), she's being made to feel bad about her taste in hairclips and desire to look pretty for the new boys showing up.

How do you feel about Snape, btw, when he makes Harry feel badly about things?

> Shaun:

> With Parvarti, though, it's much more straightforward. Assuming that 
> Professor McGonagall is enforcing a genuine rule, making a 14 year old girl 
> who is deliberately and knowingly breaking that rule out of a desire to 
> elevate herself above her peers (to make herself appear more cool or 
> prettier or whatever the aim is - I've never been a teenage girl!) feel 
> embarassed and silly is a pretty effective way to deal with the situation.

Magpie:
Yes, it is. I'm just not willing to make McGonagall out here to be demonstrating her excellent teaching philosophy in all these cases. You've mentioned that JKR assumes her audience will recognize a lot of the details of British boarding school life in the books. It seems to me that part of that life she hits pretty hard is teachers exhibiting their own personality through teaching, so just as biased and self-absorbed as any of the students.

> Magpie:
> > No, she was insulted. McGonagall was focused on how she wanted
> > her students to come across, got angry that Parvati was the
> > flirty girl she always was trying to make a different sort of
> > impression, and snapped at her that she looked ridiculous.
> > Just as Snape doesn't punish Hermione in the "I see no
> > difference" scene, he just insults her.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Totally different situation in my view. Hermione had done *nothing* wrong in 
> that scene. Quite the contrary in fact, she had tried to prevent Harry doing 
> something he shouldn't. In no way, could his comment be seen as justified by 
> anything.

Magpie:
But some behavior of Hermione's would have justified it? 
 
> Shaun:
> 
> You don't and I don't - but I think some people do. They want Professor 
> McGonagall to have not shown any sign of anger or irritation or any emotion 
> at all in disciplining Neville and Parvarti. Or, to be fair, they probably 
> don't want her to show *negative* emotion - I doubt anybody seriously thinks 
> teachers shouldn't show warmth and kindness and things like that.

Magpie:
I'll let those people speak for themselves if they really think she's supposed to be an automaton. But by admitting that you would be showing "a little from column B" in calling a student disgusting doesn't that admit that a teacher can do something because it's emotionally satisfying in the way they enforce a rule? You seem to be saying that it's unfair to say that McGonagall could find it emotionally satisfying to tell Parvati what she thinks of girls like herself who use a visit from a foreign school as a potential dating situation. Lupin would presumably have told Parvati to take the thing out of her hair without the shaming aspect. Even if shaming is a perfectly valid form of discipline, I think McGonagall naturally uses it because of her personality. Just as other teachers choose that method at different times with different reactions to it. Lupin's shaming of Harry in PoA does not, imo, shows more reluctance iirc.

Shaun:
> 
> That's quite a common position - a lot of people seem to think (and more 
> important seem to think that there's some sort of 'rule' or 'evidence' or 
> 'theory' or 'policy') that teachers should always be nice and kind and 
> fluffy and comfortable - and never say anything negative, never raise their 
> voices, never reprimand a child, never do anything that might upset a 
> child... it's a Mary Poppins idea.

Magpie:
And I haven't seen this nice, fluffy idea in the thread so it still seems like strawman. none of the teachers at Hogwarts seem to feel they need to be positive all the time, and readers don't seem to expect it either. 

Btw, Mary Poppins was anything but light or fluffy. She, too, was written as blatantly hypocritical, vain and unfair, wasn't she? The humor wasn't in her being a perfect nanny but in kids seeing that.

Shaun: 
> The balance is going to be different for different teachers. That's more a 
> matter of style than anything else.

Magpie:
And what does "style" mean here? Because all I'm saying is that the "style" of teaching for every teacher at Hogwarts basically means that the teacher takes their own personality and channels it through their teaching. It's not just picking a philosophy out of a book. If a teacher is in life snippy and impatient they're going to be a more snippy and impatient teacher compared to someone else. I think JKR shows personal flaws and strength mirrored in teaching style.

I think we see this with McGonagall throughout canon. Whether or not everything she does is defensible, which I think it obviously is, doesn't make her always acting out of the better interests of a kid.

-m




From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Sun May 24 15:49:08 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 15:49:08 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <E94D22400F5242CCB570A0B0FED5D4FB@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gvbq9k+6ons@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186728

> Shaun:
> 
> No, that's not it.
> 
> The difference comes from, in my view, the difference the 'letter of the 
> law' and the 'spirit of the law'.
> 
> We don't know the precise reasons behind the ban on first years having 
> brooms. Not for certain. So it's hard to know for certain what the 'spirit 
> of the law' is. But it's my guess that it's a safety rule. Hogwarts does not 
> want students flying around on brooms who cannot do so safely. We know from 
> Professor Hooch's first lesson that most first year students can't even make 
> a broom jump to their hand.
> 
> They don't seem to have flying lessons after first year, so presumably 
> students learn to fly in that first year.
> 
> The most likely reason for the rule does seem to be safety. Protecting 
> students is the 'spirit of the law'.
> 
> Harry, however, can fly brilliantly, naturally. He's as safe as any other 
> student on a broom. Allowing him to have one doesn't violate the spirit of 
> the law.
> 
> Most schools allow sensible exemptions from rules. They understand that even 
> a rule that is right in 99% of cases, might be wrong in 1%. Is it wrong for 
> exceptions to be made? I don't think so - and I don't think teachers should 
> be judged harshly if they do.

Magpie:
Whoa. Sorry I missed this but wow, this is exactly the kind of thing that would drive me crazy if I was a kid. It's exactly the "spirit of the law" that gets broken by saying that McGonagall's only "bending" it by going to Dumbledore. 

If the point is safety, then all first years who demonstrate an aptitude for flying should be able to be able to bring a broom (not that Harry even has to bring a broom--he's given a gift of a broom that's better than anyone else's while every other student has to buy their own or use the school brooms). Harry's hardly the first first year at Hogwarts to be able to fly already by the time he gets there. He's not even the only first year who's a good flyer in his own year. If a kid isn't already flying he probably wouldn't have a broom to bring in the first place. So to me the spirit of the rule must be directed at "naturals" like Harry as much as anybody else.  

McGonagall pushes him through because she wants him on her Quidditch team--and on the best broom she can get for him. Not because Harry himself has some urgent need to have a broom (like he needs to fly home weekends and care for his strict grandmother, or he's a professional flyer in the summer and needs to keep in shape, or he's got some medical condition where by he has to be airborne several times a week), but because she wants to beat everyone at Quidditch. (And from the pov of most students it probably also looks like there are just special rules for Harry Potter.)

-m




From zanooda2 at yahoo.com  Sun May 24 15:57:07 2009
From: zanooda2 at yahoo.com (zanooda2)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 15:57:07 -0000
Subject: How important is Hagrid?
In-Reply-To: <794599.82495.qm@web59715.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <gvbqoj+g6c9@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186729

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Jacob Owen <hagrid_hut at ...> wrote:


> I agree with you in general, with one caveat: when you say both 
> "civilization" and "human" there is yet another division between 
> muggle and wizard, and Hagrid had a muggle father.?Hagrid is the 
> only character I can think of besides Madame Maxine that has his 
> roots in muggles, wizards, and beasts.


zanooda:

I wonder why you would think that Hagrid's father was a Muggle. He was a wizard, and he was called so in the book. I'm not at home at the moment, so I can't give you the exact quote right now, but it was in GoF, "Rita Skeeter's Scoop" chapter, at the very end, where Hagrid shows his dad's picture to the Trio. But even without this quote it always seemed obvious to me that Hagrid's dad was a wizard. Also, I wouldn't qualify giants as "beasts", if that's what you meant :-).




From winterfell7 at hotmail.com  Sun May 24 16:08:24 2009
From: winterfell7 at hotmail.com (mesmer44)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 16:08:24 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvbq9k+6ons@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvbrdo+omv0@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186730

Magpie begins w/:
> > Shaun:
> > 
> > No, that's not it.
> > 
> > The difference comes from, in my view, the difference the 'letter of the 
> > law' and the 'spirit of the law'.
> > 
> > We don't know the precise reasons behind the ban on first years having 
> > brooms. Not for certain. So it's hard to know for certain what the 'spirit 
> > of the law' is. But it's my guess that it's a safety rule. Hogwarts does not 
> > want students flying around on brooms who cannot do so safely. We know from 
> > Professor Hooch's first lesson that most first year students can't even make 
> > a broom jump to their hand.
> > 
> > They don't seem to have flying lessons after first year, so presumably 
> > students learn to fly in that first year.
> > 
> > The most likely reason for the rule does seem to be safety. Protecting 
> > students is the 'spirit of the law'.
> > 
> > Harry, however, can fly brilliantly, naturally. He's as safe as any other 
> > student on a broom. Allowing him to have one doesn't violate the spirit of 
> > the law.
> > 
> > Most schools allow sensible exemptions from rules. They understand that even 
> > a rule that is right in 99% of cases, might be wrong in 1%. Is it wrong for 
> > exceptions to be made? I don't think so - and I don't think teachers should 
> > be judged harshly if they do.
> 
> Magpie:
> Whoa. Sorry I missed this but wow, this is exactly the kind of thing that would drive me crazy if I was a kid. It's exactly the "spirit of the law" that gets broken by saying that McGonagall's only "bending" it by going to Dumbledore. 
> 
> If the point is safety, then all first years who demonstrate an aptitude for flying should be able to be able to bring a broom (not that Harry even has to bring a broom--he's given a gift of a broom that's better than anyone else's while every other student has to buy their own or use the school brooms). Harry's hardly the first first year at Hogwarts to be able to fly already by the time he gets there. He's not even the only first year who's a good flyer in his own year. If a kid isn't already flying he probably wouldn't have a broom to bring in the first place. So to me the spirit of the rule must be directed at "naturals" like Harry as much as anybody else.  
> 
> McGonagall pushes him through because she wants him on her Quidditch team--and on the best broom she can get for him. Not because Harry himself has some urgent need to have a broom (like he needs to fly home weekends and care for his strict grandmother, or he's a professional flyer in the summer and needs to keep in shape, or he's got some medical condition where by he has to be airborne several times a week), but because she wants to beat everyone at Quidditch. (And from the pov of most students it probably also looks like there are just special rules for Harry Potter.)
> 
> -m
Steve replies:

Magpie makes good points here. I understand the "spirit" vs "letter" of the law distinctions shaun is mentioning, but I don't think they actually apply in this specific case of McG allowing Harry to have a really high quality broom in his first year.  I think Magpie is right on the mark thinking McGonagall's main motivation is for Harry being on the team with the best broom available so that McGonagall's "home" Quidditch team has a better chance of winning.  Of course, it also provides JKR w/ major plot lines for Harry playing Quidditch, although perhaps she could have just accomplished that by not writing there being a "no first years having brooms" rule. I imagine you mean Harry flying home to care for his sick grandmother as opposed to his strict grandmother however? :)




From HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com  Sun May 24 16:57:55 2009
From: HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com (HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com)
Date: 24 May 2009 16:57:55 -0000
Subject: Weekly Chat, 5/24/2009, 1:00 pm 
Message-ID: <1243184275.520.78301.m7@yahoogroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186731

Reminder from: HPforGrownups Yahoo! Group
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From foxmoth at qnet.com  Sun May 24 16:58:32 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 16:58:32 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gvbkb3+n8pc@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvbubo+hm8e@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186732


> 
> lizzyben:
> 
> But was it ever an irrational superstition?

Pippin:
Yes, I think so. Canon makes a point of telling us that Lupin has no idea how the DE's could have found Harry in Tottenham Court Road. He says "Voldemort" in his conversation with Harry at Grimmauld Place. Clearly he doesn't know about the taboo as yet. This seems to be a power that Voldemort didn't have until the Ministry takeover.

Lizzyben:
> But it sort of begs the question - if DD knew that "Lord Voldemort" was really just plain old Tom Riddle, why wouldn't he make that fact known? Why wouldn't he encourage others to use that name, as DD did, instead of the grandiose name Riddle had created? Is it so that DD doesn't fear Voldemort, but everyone else does? To me, it's sort of like as if Harry said something about that jerk Snape, and DD gently insisted that Harry call Snape by his proper name: "The Half-Blood Prince!" 

Pippin:

Voldemort wasn't trying to scare people out of saying "Tom."  But I think Dumbledore didn't want to make an issue of Riddle's bloodline. There were some people who wouldn't have trusted Voldemort if they'd known he was once Tom Riddle -- but Dumbledore did not think that would be a good reason not to trust someone. 

Pippin




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Sun May 24 17:16:22 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 17:16:22 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvbq9k+6ons@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvbvd6+ke0n@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186733


> Magpie:
> Whoa. Sorry I missed this but wow, this is exactly the kind of thing that would drive me crazy if I was a kid. It's exactly the "spirit of the law" that gets broken by saying that McGonagall's only "bending" it by going to Dumbledore. 
> 
> If the point is safety, then all first years who demonstrate an aptitude for flying should be able to be able to bring a broom (not that Harry even has to bring a broom--he's given a gift of a broom that's better than anyone else's while every other student has to buy their own or use the school brooms). Harry's hardly the first first year at Hogwarts to be able to fly already by the time he gets there. He's not even the only first year who's a good flyer in his own year. If a kid isn't already flying he probably wouldn't have a broom to bring in the first place. So to me the spirit of the rule must be directed at "naturals" like Harry as much as anybody else.  

Pippin:
Whoa. Calling Harry a good flier is like calling Mozart a good musician. Harry is truly exceptional, capable enough as an absolute novice  to make a catch that Charlie Weasley, who could have played professionally,  couldn't have made. Harry gets to be the youngest House player in about a century, so the rule has been bent before, probably for the same reason, a truly rare talent.   Would you deny Mozart his own musical instrument and the opportunity to play in competition?

Pippin





From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Sun May 24 17:32:10 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 17:32:10 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvbvd6+ke0n@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvc0aq+a54q@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186734

> > Magpie:
> > Whoa. Sorry I missed this but wow, this is exactly the kind of thing that would drive me crazy if I was a kid. It's exactly the "spirit of the law" that gets broken by saying that McGonagall's only "bending" it by going to Dumbledore. 
> > 
> > If the point is safety, then all first years who demonstrate an aptitude for flying should be able to be able to bring a broom (not that Harry even has to bring a broom--he's given a gift of a broom that's better than anyone else's while every other student has to buy their own or use the school brooms). Harry's hardly the first first year at Hogwarts to be able to fly already by the time he gets there. He's not even the only first year who's a good flyer in his own year. If a kid isn't already flying he probably wouldn't have a broom to bring in the first place. So to me the spirit of the rule must be directed at "naturals" like Harry as much as anybody else.  
> 
> Pippin:
> Whoa. Calling Harry a good flier is like calling Mozart a good musician. Harry is truly exceptional, capable enough as an absolute novice  to make a catch that Charlie Weasley, who could have played professionally,  couldn't have made. Harry gets to be the youngest House player in about a century, so the rule has been bent before, probably for the same reason, a truly rare talent.   Would you deny Mozart his own musical instrument and the opportunity to play in competition?

Magpie:
No, it's like calling a good natural flier a good natural flier. Harry is not being trained to be a professional Quidditch player by Hogwarts. His personal skills are not much interest to anyone beyond the inter-house rivalry. They don't buy him a broom because he's supposed to be the Mozart of Quidditch. He doesn't practice out of some prodigy specific need to have his own broom that's the best there is. Viktor Krum is even significantly better than he is at the same age so if there's anybody who's the Mozart here it's Viktor. 

Harry's just a good Quidditch player at Hogwarts who practices when the team practices and later becomes captain, then doesn't play professionally. McGonagall gets him the broom so he can play on that broom and be a Seeker for Gryffindor and therefore win her house the trophy. I've no reason to imagine other situations and sacrificial motivation that don't exist in canon.

Steve:
I imagine you mean Harry flying home to care
for his sick grandmother as opposed to his strict grandmother however? :)

Magpie:
LOL! Yup, that's what I meant. I had strict older ladies on the brain there, apparently!

-m




From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Sun May 24 19:23:58 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 19:23:58 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gvbubo+hm8e@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvc6se+8m9n@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186735

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> > 
> > lizzyben:
> > 
> > But was it ever an irrational superstition?
> 
> Pippin:
> Yes, I think so. Canon makes a point of telling us that Lupin has no idea how the DE's could have found Harry in Tottenham Court Road. He says "Voldemort" in his conversation with Harry at Grimmauld Place. Clearly he doesn't know about the taboo as yet. This seems to be a power that Voldemort didn't have until the Ministry takeover.
> 
> Lizzyben:
> > But it sort of begs the question - if DD knew that "Lord Voldemort" was really just plain old Tom Riddle, why wouldn't he make that fact known? Why wouldn't he encourage others to use that name, as DD did, instead of the grandiose name Riddle had created? Is it so that DD doesn't fear Voldemort, but everyone else does? To me, it's sort of like as if Harry said something about that jerk Snape, and DD gently insisted that Harry call Snape by his proper name: "The Half-Blood Prince!" 
> 
> Pippin:
> 
> Voldemort wasn't trying to scare people out of saying "Tom."  But I think Dumbledore didn't want to make an issue of Riddle's bloodline. There were some people who wouldn't have trusted Voldemort if they'd known he was once Tom Riddle -- but Dumbledore did not think that would be a good reason not to trust someone. 
> 
> Pippin
>
Montavilla47:

No, but hypocrisy is.  If Lord Voldemort is actually the half-blood Tom 
Riddle, then his pureblood philosophy is pretty much nonsense.  I'm sure
he could spin it so that Tom, Sr. looked like the aggressor and Merope as
a victim, if he wanted to villify Muggles.  But it would still make him 
look ridiculous and divide his support base.

I find it unclear how the purebloods feel about half-bloods.  Harry, who
is technically a half-blood (since Lily is Muggleborn), seems to think 
that the Death Eaters would find him nearly as objectionable as a 
Muggleborn.  Hermione says that they would need to accept half-
bloods, since the purest wizards aren't numerous enough to take
over.  

But it seems weird to me that there would be a stigma against
Muggles and Muggleborns *and* blood traitors (those who 
side with Muggles, Muggleborns, or worse yet, marry them), and
*not* against their offspring.   








From catlady at wicca.net  Sun May 24 21:17:47 2009
From: catlady at wicca.net (Catlady (Rita Prince Winston))
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 21:17:47 -0000
Subject: Cats/Sword/
Message-ID: <gvcdhr+6a0a@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186736

Carol wondered in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186661>:

<< how Crookshanks got into a closed room >>

Cats are good at that. I even have an example that doesn't violate the laws of physics. Long ago, I lived in a kind of L shaped apartment on the fourth floor of a building in far north Manhattan, and my roommate insisted that when we left for work in the morning, we lock my cat and her cat in the bathroom until we got home. So how is it that I always came home and my Nan greeted me at the front door? Eventually I figured it out: the bathroom window and the kitchen were both open because it was summer and we didn't have air conditioning, and the leap from one to the other was a straight line four or five yards long (estimated by eye), and Nan was a brave and bold predator ... I shuddered to think of her jumping. It's not so long a jump, but it is way too long a fall, and how could she even be sure that the kitchen window was open? Without my glasses, I couldn't, and cats are supposed to be just as near-sighted as I am ... Note that the other cat remained locked in the bathroom until I came  home and released her.

Carol wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186678>:

<< -it's not going to provide Harry with any sort of love protection (impossible, anyway, because they don't share the same blood) >>

I don't recall that the 'love protection' had anything to do with shared blood -- isn't there an argument that Harry's temporary death put love protection on all the Hogwarts defenders? Where the blood comes in is that DD cast a spell that Lily's love protection on Harry would last as long as he lived with her 'blood' (meaning Petunia and Dudley, not a precious sealed test tube drawn for a Muggle blood test but never used). So if Ron died leaving a love protection on Harry, such a spell would keep him protected as long as he lived with Ron's blood - conveniently in the form of Ginny.

<< wondering what would happen if an "unworthy Gryffindor" or a
non-Gryffindor ("worthy" or "unworthy") tried to use the Sword >>

Would it turn against them? Turn against them only if they were attempting an evil use? Fly away out of their hands back to the Headmaster's Office?

Steve bboyminn wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186680>:

<< The boy whose brain is downing in stress chemical to the point of making him disfunction, seem to have found a way to deal with very stressful situation in end. So, do you suppose he did that by facing stress and overcoming it, or do you suppose he did that by being made to feel good all the time and avoiding stress? Yes, Snape's methods were unkind, but in the end, they produced a Neville who openly challenge the darkest most dangerous wizard of all time. >>

Neville was ALWAYS brave: wasn't it in PS/SS that he started a physical fight with both Crabbe and Goyle? Definitely it was in PS/SS that he told the Trio that he wouldn't allow them to go out after curfew and lose still more House points. What he gained was competence; maybe the missing ingredient was taming his adrenaline enough that he could hear something besides the pounding of his blood in his ears and that his hands weren't shaking to hard to hold his wand steady; maybe the missing ingredient was a drop of self-confidence; maybe something else.

Whatever it was, I don't see anywhere in canon that he got it as a result of Snape's teaching or McGonagall's teaching. It appears that he got some of it from HARRY's teaching in the Defense Association, where Harry's way of correcting Neville's clumsiness was gentle, such as saying something like 'Very good, Neville, but next time aim at your opponent instead of at me'. I believe it was teacher Harry's encouragement as much as Neville's desire to avenge his parents that led him to practise for hours and hours and get good at this stuff. 

Of course it was the end of Year 5 when he duelled Death Eaters, and already at the beginning of Year 4, Neville was showing a bit of confidence by proudly explaining the wonders of Mimulus mimbletonia, and not collapsing when it misbehaved. The Mimulus mimbletonia was a gift from Uncle Algie acknowledging that our little Neville is really good at Herbology.

I suppose Neville had some innate talent for Herbology, but I also suppose that it would have come to naught if Professor Sprout used the same techniques (humiliation and punishment) on him as Professors Snape and McGonagall did. I imagine that she used the same techniques as Harry did - praising the part he did right while suggesting improvement in the part he did wrong, rather than ignoring the part he did right and making a very big deal about the part he did wrong. No shouting (except urgent safety instructions).

Carol wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186701>:

<< Evidently, Hogwarts has no rules regarding hairstyles (or unnatural hair color--Tonks would have been in violation of the rules for her whole seven years!). >>

I agree with Shaun in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186709> that << for Tonks, bubblegum pink is a natural hair color.>> What is 'natural' is a little different in a group of supernatural people.

Alla wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186714>:

<< I mean, isn't it sort of a symbolic moment when Dumbledore tells Harry to say Voldemort and gives him that famous line about fear of the name only increasing fear of the person? So I am wondering isn't this moment sort of negates that earlier symbolism? The reason I feel that way is because now anybody who is going to say the name will basically be sort of suicidal, no? I mean, of course I am not saying that it is BAD to try and escape trace, but now the symbolic standingup to the tyrant is sort of not possible, unless you are an idiot? >>

I agree with you, or actually I speculate that the Trace was already on the name during Vold War I, and DD's advice to his Phoenices not to fear a name is part of the reason they were being picked off like low-hanging fruit, maybe more of the reason than Peter's spy reports.

Alla wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186717>:

<< Would you consider even for one second that Hogwarts has a rule
**against reading books in the company of your two friends outside**. Whether or not Ron would have said anything, I did not need him to. >>

While I would never have predicted that any school had a rule against taking library books outdoors, it strikes me as a perfectly possible rule. When Snape said taking library books outdoors was against the rules, I would have assumed he was telling the truth if it wasn't for Ron's statement, and even so, I can't decide if I believe he was telling the truth because I didn't hear from Hermione about it. I believe Hermione is better informed of the library rules than Ron is. 

And I have encountered school library that had stupid rules that I never would have guessed if I hadn't been told about them. I can check out the book and keep it in my locker but I can't take it home to read overnight? Well, if someone takes it home and forgets to bring it back, it's harder to retrieve than from school premises. 




From hagrid_hut at yahoo.com  Sun May 24 17:18:44 2009
From: hagrid_hut at yahoo.com (Jacob Owen)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 10:18:44 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: How important is Hagrid?
In-Reply-To: <gvbqoj+g6c9@eGroups.com>
References: <gvbqoj+g6c9@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <675335.77347.qm@web59714.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186737






________________________________
From: zanooda2 <zanooda2 at yahoo.com>
To: HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, May 24, 2009 7:57:07 AM
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: How important is Hagrid?




zanooda:

I wonder why you would think that Hagrid's father was a Muggle. He was a wizard, and he was called so in the book. I'm not at home at the moment, so I can't give you the exact quote right now, but it was in GoF, "Rita Skeeter's Scoop" chapter, at the very end, where Hagrid shows his dad's picture to the Trio. But even without this quote it always seemed obvious to me that Hagrid's dad was a wizard. Also, I wouldn't qualify giants as "beasts", if that's what you meant :-).
?
Hagrid_Hut:
I stand corrected: Hagrid's father was indeed a wizard.? Also, I only meant "beast" in the pejorative sense as applied to the greater conflict between wizards and magical creatures in the series.? I wouldn't call him a beast either, but he definitely has a wild side to him tempered just enough to survive within the ministry of magic laws (barely).
I wonder how powerful he would have become had he not been expelled from Hogwarts?? He would have been able to cultivate his abilities and not have to carry the stigma of an outcast.
An interesting side note: I just read that Rowling based Hagrid's character off of the Welsh chapter of the Hell's Angels.? A parallel could be drawn as Hagrid is a transitional character between wizards and magical creatures, the Hell's Angels are stereotypically thought to police criminals (as many facets of organized crime are).





      

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Sun May 24 21:36:55 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 21:36:55 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <E94D22400F5242CCB570A0B0FED5D4FB@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gvceln+2ns@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186738

> > Magpie:
> > I see that obviously the school could have some rules that aren't
> > strictly enforced, or maybe what Luna's doing doesn't break them.
> > But since this is fiction the simplest way of looking at it seems
> > more useful. Ron doesn't swear to his teachers, and I think the way
> > they're expected to speak to teachers is shown in the reactions of
> > teachers. Luna's shown casually wearing funky earrings and things
> > to class with no reaction and I took it as a sign that that's okay.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> I agree that the simplest way of looking at things seems most useful. 

a_svirn:
Well, it is quite simple for me to assume that McGonagall is being her usual irritable self. No need to devise some fanfictional Hogwarts dress-code here. 


 
> Magpie:
> > No, she was insulted. McGonagall was focused on how she wanted
> > her students to come across, got angry that Parvati was the
> > flirty girl she always was trying to make a different sort of
> > impression, and snapped at her that she looked ridiculous.
> > Just as Snape doesn't punish Hermione in the "I see no
> > difference" scene, he just insults her.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Totally different situation in my view. Hermione had done *nothing* wrong in 
> that scene. 

a_svirn:
It sounds like you reserve the right for teachers to insult and ridicule students who *do* something wrong. 

> a_svirn:
> > I fail entirely to see how it is my burden. Neither narrator, nor
> > McGonagall herself says anything about any rules Parvati
> > allegedly violated. Nowhere in the books are hairstyle regulations
> > mentioned. You are the one who makes this claim, and the only thing
> > you've come up with by way of supporting it is your own real life
> > experience. Which, of course, cannot be convincingly cited as "proof"
> > of anything Hogwarts-related. Sorry, but that burden is all yours.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Sorry - but this is simply isn't the case. My own real life experience is 
> self-evidently not the only thing I've come up with. Quite the contrary. 
> I've posted about one and a thousand words of regulations from real schools, 
> clearly showing that the type of rule I am talking about is quite common in 
> British schools.
> 
> You don't have to accept that as proof of anything, but, please don't try 
> and pretend it doesn't exist.

a_svirn:
Eh, what doesn't exist, dress-code in real life English Schools? I never pretended anything of the sort. We are discussing imaginary Hogwarts however. And that's not the point anyway. The point is, you are the one who accuses Parvati of violating some hairstyle regulations. The narrator does not do it; McGonagall herself does not do it. You do, so it is up to you to prove it.

> Shaun:
> It is clear that earlier in this discussion, you were under the mistaken 
> impression that such a rule isn't one that a school in Britain could 
> possibly reasonably have. You said this:
> 
> "Approved sort of hair clasp?! What is it, North Korea? I don't believe even 
> Umbridge could be bothered to regulate hair clasps."
> 
> Your position seems to me to have been based - in part, not in total - on a 
> mistaken idea about what schools outside of totalitarian regimes could 
> possibly be bothered to regulate.
> 
> Even after it has been clearly demonstrated that there are schools in 
> Britain that *do* bother to regulate such matters - you do not seem to have 
> modified your position at all.
> 
> This is why I refer to the burden of proof. 

a_svirn:
Seems to me, you refer to the burden of proof, because you can't find any except in your real life experience. Which is not at all canon. And therefore not at all proof. 

> a_svirn:
> > "Assumption" being the operative word here. Your assumption
> > seems to be that if she does it then it's OK, because she is a
> > teacher. Neither my real-life experience, nor my knowledge about
> > Hogwarts teachers en masse and McGonagall in particular leads me
> > to assume anything of the sort.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> No, my assumption is not that it's OK because she is a teacher. My 
> assumption is that it's OK because we see a teacher taking an action that 
> would normally be completely acceptable under the rules of a great many 
> schools in the country in which the school that that teacher is situated and 
> we have no reason whatsoever to think that this school is an exception to 
> that rule.

a_svirn:
What do you mean by "acceptable"? If you are saying that McGonagall was within her rights to make Parvati remove the ornament in question, then I agree with you. Not because of some obscure hairpins rule of which there is no trace in the books, but because, as Pippin pointed out, she was acting in loco parentis. Still it was petty of her to act that way and insult Parvati. 


> a_svirn:
> > No, it is not my assumption at all. Neville certainly shares some
> > responsibility for the whole password fiasco, but not the whole of it,
> > and not even the most of it. My *concern* is that while the entire
> > situation is of McGonagall's own making, the only one who's got blamed
> > for the whole thing is Neville. This is a classic case of scapegoating:
> > when a person of authority abjures any responsibility for her own
> > neglect and carelessness and lays the blame squarely on the victim of
> > the said neglect.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> First of all, I really don't think you've even come close to demonstrating 
> that this "entire situation is of McGonagall's own making." Professor 
> McGonagall was not responsible for putting Sir Cadogan in place as the 
> guardian of Gryffindor Tower - Professor Dumbledore was - and there was no 
> other choice. No other painting was willing to take on the role. Secondly, 
> as far as I can see, we've got no evidence that Professor McGonagall was 
> aware that Neville had problems remembering passwords - he does adequately 
> in her class and she feels his main problem is lack of confidence. 

a_svirn:
That was way later in the fifth book, iirc. And by then Neville had started to change under Harry's tutelage. 

> Shaun:
You seem 
> to be assuming that she must be aware of Neville's password issues. Why do 
> you assume that?

a_svirn:
After more than two years teaching him how could she possibly have missed the fact that he has a very bad memory? And we know she does, she make a reference to it when he couldn't hand in his permission slip. 

"Please, Professor, I?I think I've lost
"Your grandmother sent yours to me directly, Longbottom," said Professor McGonagall. "She seemed to think it was safer. Well, that's all, you may leave."


> Shaun:
> And besides that - I have to say that even taking the broadest possible view 
> I can see as possibly justified of Professor McGonagall's "failures" in this 
> case - even if we assume she was aware of Neville's problem and did 
> *nothing* to deal with it (which would, in my view, be a serious dereliction 
> of duty of care by his Head of House), I'd still place the bulk of the blame 
> on Neville - for not reporting the loss of the passwords in a timely 
> fashion. McGonagall's "failure" if it does exist is in not helping Neville 
> to find an alternative way of dealing with the problem. That doesn't have 
> any impact on his failure to report the loss of the passwords.

a_svirn:
Seems to me her obvious dereliction of duty has the most direct impact on Neville's ability to deal with a difficult security challenge. 

> Shaun:
> And also - even if Professor McGonagall shares a lot of the responsibility 
> for what went wrong in this case, unfortunately, she is the person 
> responsible for disciplining Neville. If he deserves to be punished, then he 
> deserves to be punished - even if the person who finds themselves in the 
> position of having to do it isn't in the best position of moral authority to 
> be dealing with this particular breach. 

a_svirn:
Kind of hypocritical of her to punish a student for something she is also responsible. I am not saying that Neville had no responsibility whatsoever in this case. I am saying that McGonagall's failure to acknowledge *her* ? in my view the most significant ? share of the responsibility makes her rather harsh and humiliating punishment a classic example of scapegoating. 

> a_svirn:
> > Didn't know or didn't want to know? Or care?
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> I think it's quite likely she didn't know.

a_svirn:
Well, she should have. As a head of the house of a child with an obvious impairment it was her obligation to make reasonable adjustments for such a child. By the way, in real life schools in Britain it is unlawful to discriminate against children with disabilities, and, yes, not making reasonable adjustments counts as discrimination. Unfortunately, as I've already said, real life laws and rules do not always apply in Hogwarts. 
> 
> 
> Shaun:
> > > When Professor McGonagall arranged for Hermione to be given a Time 
> > > Turner -
> > > if Hermione had then chosen to use that Time Turner to rob Honeydukes, 
> > > would
> > > you be claiming Professor McGonagall bore all the responsibility for 
> > > that
> > > and Hermione none at all? Somehow I doubt it.
> 
> a_svirn:
> > So do I. What does it have to do with anything?
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Because your position seems to be that because McGonagall might have done 
> something that made it possible for Neville to do the wrong thing, that's 
> she becomes primarily responsible for him doing the wrong thing. Well, the 
> example I've given is one I see as an equivalent situation.

a_svirn:
Not at all. You've given an example where McGonagall does nothing wrong, and Hermione abuses her trust. Whereis my point is that McGonagall does something wrong, namely, neglects her responsibilities. 

> a_svirn:
> > So what is the fundamental difference between "breaking" and "bending"?
> > If it is a student who does it, then it is breaking, and when it is a
> > teacher who does the breaking it is actually "bending"?
> 
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> No, that's not it.
> 
> The difference comes from, in my view, the difference the 'letter of the 
> law' and the 'spirit of the law'.
> 
> We don't know the precise reasons behind the ban on first years having 
> brooms. Not for certain. So it's hard to know for certain what the 'spirit 
> of the law' is. But it's my guess that it's a safety rule. Hogwarts does not 
> want students flying around on brooms who cannot do so safely. We know from 
> Professor Hooch's first lesson that most first year students can't even make 
> a broom jump to their hand.
> 
> They don't seem to have flying lessons after first year, so presumably 
> students learn to fly in that first year.
> 
> The most likely reason for the rule does seem to be safety. Protecting 
> students is the 'spirit of the law'.
> 
> Harry, however, can fly brilliantly, naturally. He's as safe as any other 
> student on a broom. Allowing him to have one doesn't violate the spirit of 
> the law.


a_svirn:
And not a single first-year student in more than a century was good enough on the broom to be considered safe? Not likely. Draco seemed perfectly safe while airborne. 


> a_svirn:
> > I do not accuse McGonagall of some sort of criminal offence,
> > only of being petty. But if we are expected to uphold the sacred
> > "innocent until guilty" principle, then those who accuse Parvati
> > of violating an imaginary dress-code must prove their case.
> > No one in the book accused her of breaking any rules; there is
> > not a single mention of any hair-related regulations, instead
> > there are tons of mentions of unusual styles and ornaments that
> > Hogwarts students sport. The presumption of innocence does not
> > concern teachers exclusively, you know. Students have the same
> > rights under the law. If not always under the school rules.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Well... no, they don't, actually. Not in most places. Not in most times. 
> Schoolchildren very often have far less rights than adults do.

a_svirn:
Where the presumption of innocence is concerned they do have exactly the same rights. Under the law children are innocent until they are proven guilty just like adults. 




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Sun May 24 21:55:12 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 21:55:12 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvc0aq+a54q@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvcfo0+tcjj@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186739

> > Pippin:
> > Whoa. Calling Harry a good flier is like calling Mozart a good musician. Harry is truly exceptional, capable enough as an absolute novice  to make a catch that Charlie Weasley, who could have played professionally,  couldn't have made. Harry gets to be the youngest House player in about a century, so the rule has been bent before, probably for the same reason, a truly rare talent.   Would you deny Mozart his own musical instrument and the opportunity to play in competition?
> 
> Magpie:
> No, it's like calling a good natural flier a good natural flier. Harry is not being trained to be a professional Quidditch player by Hogwarts. His personal skills are not much interest to anyone beyond the inter-house rivalry. They don't buy him a broom because he's supposed to be the Mozart of Quidditch. 

a_svirn:
And besides, shouldn't the Salieri of Quidditch be given the same opportunity? So that he wouldn't have the reason to complain on the unfairness and favouritism of the Higher Authority? 







From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Mon May 25 00:07:58 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 00:07:58 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvcfo0+tcjj@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvcngu+ha2a@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186740

> a_svirn:
> And besides, shouldn't the Salieri of Quidditch be given the same opportunity? So that he wouldn't have the reason to complain on the unfairness and favouritism of the Higher Authority?

Magpie:
Sure--especially if the Salieri is the one who really wants to work at it. Maybe he's the one who already trains every day. First years obviously don't regularly get the rules waived once the flying instructor sees how well they do.

Of course, we're just speculating the flying rule has anything to do with safety. The safety concern might not have anything to do with the idea that first years have never been on a broom but instead be assuming that 11 year olds new to the school aren't mature enough to not do something stupid even if they do fly well. (Those are more likely to be the daredevils.) Or just as likely the rule could be there as a way of putting first years in their place and reserving special rights for older students. As you get older you're rewarded with more freedom/more responsibility. That just as likely something a school might do.

-m




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Mon May 25 04:15:07 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 04:15:07 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvd5rv+8r2e@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvd60c+is7l@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186742

Alla:

> British public schools do not have Quidditch, do they not? And
> the list of examples that I can give of the things existing in
> Hogwarts and not in any British public school can go on and on.

Shaun:
<SNIP>
No, but they do have Rugby and Football (soccer) and the children would
understand the fanaticism associated with Quidditch because they are used to
similar fanaticism associated with real sports at school - and especially at
traditional boarding schools ("Play up, play up, and play the game!") JKR
routinely draws on children's experience of their schools so they understand
Hogwarts. When she 'perverts' that understanding, she explains in quite a
lot of detail that she's doing it.

When we first discover that detentions at Hogwarts aren't like the typical
detentions at a Muggle school, Hagrid explicitly explains the difference (to
Draco) .<SNIP>


Alla:

Exactly. They have sports and they understand the fanaticism associated with
them. Just as let's see kids in Ukraine would perfectly well understand the
soccer (I am used to call soccer football myself), kids in America would
understand fanaticism associated with baseball, American football, etc.

Kids who **never in their life** went to boarding schools could understand
fanaticism associated with sports. I did not. I love soccer soooo much. My
brother did not go to boarding school, he is a huge fan of soccer.

But they do not have the particular sport called Quidditch. It is specifically
applies to Hogwarts and to no other of real life schools.

Neither do they have the Triwizards tournament. I am sure they have schools and
interschools competitions. They however do not have tournaments where kids are
trying to take eggs from Dragons, fight in the magical maze, etc. It is Hogwarts
specific in detail but in a feel it is understandable for any child who ever
participated in the exciting competition, in short in my opinion it is both
Hogwarts specific and universal.

What I am trying to say here Shaun is that while nobody is arguing with you that
Hogwarts is based on English Boarding school model in general, I would certainly
disagree with you that every particular detail that is in place or was ever in
place in English boarding school should apply to Hogwarts.

I really have no problem to acknowledge the possibility that Hogwarts has
regulations about hairclips and/or hairstyles. It does not mean I have to agree
with it, but eh if canon for interpetation is shown, why not? For example I
certainly disagreed that Dumbledore for example asked Snape to kill him before
DH came out (HAHA).
However, I definitely acknowledged the possibility of it, because the pieces
were all there in canon, I just interpeted them differently and incorrectly.

To see where you are coming from I really do not need many real life schools
regulations about hair. One would suffice from canon.

JMO,

Alla









From zanooda2 at yahoo.com  Mon May 25 04:23:13 2009
From: zanooda2 at yahoo.com (zanooda2)
Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 04:23:13 -0000
Subject: How important is Hagrid?
In-Reply-To: <675335.77347.qm@web59714.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <gvd6fh+1lhd@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186743

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Jacob Owen <hagrid_hut at ...> wrote:

> I wonder how powerful he would have become had he not been expelled 
> from Hogwarts??


zanooda:

Well, Hagrid said himself that he "...never was great shakes at magic, really..." :-). OTOH, he had four more years to study. He would have probably gotten an "O" for Care of Magical Creatures and went to work with dragons after school, like Charlie Weasley :-).




From wildirishrose at fiber.net  Mon May 25 04:45:22 2009
From: wildirishrose at fiber.net (wildirishrose01us)
Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 04:45:22 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <55A866C30DA14E258E439E0A11915521@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gvd7p2+2lt1@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186744

Shaun:

And in a sense, it's even more important you do this with kids who have learning difficulties. If you allow a child's learning difficulties to stop you letting them do things they should be capable of, then you're not doing the child a service. You're actually doing them a great disservice. There are limits - no child with a learning difficulty should ever be knowingly be placed in 
a situation which their LD actually prevents them from doing. But placing them in a situation where they are expected to do what other children their age do when you know they are capable of it, even if they find it harder, is generally a good thing.
 
Yes, you have to make some allowances for them, some accomodations. But the idea is to give the child only those accomodations that they actually need, and not give them accomodations to the level that you start to retard their development of skills they are capable of.
> 

Marianne:

Shaun, I hope this is part of your post.

I have a child that has learning disabilities.  I was guilty of standing in the way of allowing him to do things.  I used his LD as an excuse, because I was the one that worried too much.  I wrapped him in cotton as much as I could.  But when he was in school there were times when he had no choice to be in with the "normal" kids in classes.  Most teachers expected him to do his share, obviously on his learning level, and it was the best thing that ever happened to him - and me. My son even introduced me to the class rat - something I thought I'd never do.  As years have gone by, and he is in a job training situation, I've seen him become more and more independant.  He does things that I would never let him do.  Like touch a stove, etc.  He is not placed in situations that is beyond his limits, but he's learning beyond the ones I ever thought he could do.  Although he's never left alone - left to run amuck as I put it.  I'm darned proud of him and ashamed of myself for not allowing him to progress until now.

If muggle schools has LD kids in their system, I wonder if Hogwarts would allow LD children in?  Would there be some kind of magic to tame down ADHD?  I can't imagine Hogwarts could/would ever change a personality of a child.  Muggle schools couldn't do it.  Or would parents keep their child home.  Sort of like the Kendra/Ariana situation.

Sorry it's so long.

Marianne




From drednort at alphalink.com.au  Mon May 25 08:54:33 2009
From: drednort at alphalink.com.au (Shaun Hately)
Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 18:54:33 +1000
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvd7p2+2lt1@eGroups.com>
References: <gvd7p2+2lt1@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <85CD4D9323EA438BAEDD685DBB4CE883@ShaunPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186745

> Magpie:
> Whoa. Sorry I missed this but wow, this is exactly the kind of thing
> that would drive me crazy if I was a kid. It's exactly the "spirit of
> the law" that gets broken by saying that McGonagall's only "bending"
> it by going to Dumbledore.

Shaun:

Really? Well, I find that odd. Both based on my own expectations of teachers 
as a child, and in the expectations of the children I teach today. Most 
children have a reasonably strong sense of what they consider to be right 
and wrong (which may or may not match the common adult perception of these 
things) and most children seem to understand that sometimes rules should be 
bent in order to make things fair.

Someboy in this discussion has referred to 'zero tolerance' in education. 
Zero tolerance is an idea that has gained a lot of currency in schools - 
especially in the United States - in recent years - and it refers to schools 
treating particular rules as rules that cannot be varied under any 
circumstances. And it leads to, at times, absolutely ridiculous results.

A few real examples of situations this thinking has lead to:

a five year old child suspended from kindergarten for 'possession of a 
weapon'. A nail file.

three boys suspended (and facing expulsion) from school for 'possession of a 
firearm'. A water pistol.

a seven year old boy suspeneded from a school in Los Angeles for, again, 
'possession of a weapon'. It was a keyring, it looked like a gun, but was 
only one and half inches long.

13 year old David Silverstein who made a toy rocket out of a Pringles 
canister and was suspended for the rest of the school year for 'possession 
of a weapon'.

The boy in Garland, Texas who was suspended for possession of a weapon for 
forming his hand into the shape of a gun.

A ten year old girl suspended under sexual harrassment rules for asking a 
boy if he liked her.

six year old Seamus Morris of Colorado Springs, suspended from school under 
his schools zero tolerance drug policy - for giving another child a lemon 
drop.

Weapons in schools are serious, so are drugs, and so is sexual harrassment. 
It's absolutely sensible and reasonable for schools to have rules about 
these things - and very strict rules. *But* that also requires the school to 
be willing to be flexible enough to make exceptions when the situation calls 
for it.

There's a case before the US Supreme Court at the moment about a 13 year old 
girl who was strip searched by her teachers on suspicion she was carrying 
drugs. The drug in question was Advil (ibuprofen). This is the type of 
situation that expecting schools to impose rules without expecting them to 
show some degree of commonsense to modify their approach in particular 
cases, leads to.

Magpie:
> If the point is safety, then all first years who demonstrate an
> aptitude for flying should be able to be able to bring a broom
> (not that Harry even has to bring a broom--he's given a gift of
> a broom that's better than anyone else's while every other
> student has to buy their own or use the school brooms). Harry's
> hardly the first first year at Hogwarts to be able to fly already
> by the time he gets there. He's not even the only first year who's
> a good flyer in his own year. If a kid isn't already flying he
> probably wouldn't have a broom to bring in the first place. So
> to me the spirit of the rule must be directed at "naturals" like
> Harry as much as anybody else.

Shaun:

First of all, let me just remind people that I'm only guessing that the 
reason behind the rule is safety. It does seem to me to be the most likely 
reason, but I'm open to the idea there's something else behind it.

Having said that, to a great extent here, I agree with you. If the rule is 
about safety, and the reason it's being bent in this case is because safety 
isn't a concern for Harry, then, yes, I would expect it to be bent in any 
other case identical to Harry's.

The question is, are there any other cases identical to Harry's?

Harry doesn't just seem to be good on a broom. He seems to be absolutely 
brilliant. Oliver Wood, the first time he sees Harry practice as a seeker, 
believes he has the potential to play internationally someday.

When I was a kid, I was a good swimmer - backstroke was my style. A coach 
from the Australian Institute of Sport came down to see us swim, and after 
watching us for a while, he told us what he thought of our potential. I was 
good - but nothing particularly special. I could maybe reach state rep if I 
really worked hard. Most of us got similar verdicts.

One of us, however, was a potential Olympian - he was in a totally different 
category from the rest of us (and he did go to the Barcelona Olympics and 
brought home a bronze medal from Atlanta).

There's a big difference between being good - and being a potential 
international.

Harry is the first first year in a century to be selected for his house 
team. He's not just good - he's truly exceptional. IIRC, the only times 
Harry fails to get the Snitch in all his time at Hogwarts is in matches 
where he became unconscious. When he's allowed to play a full game, he wins 
every time.

An exception that can be justified for him may not be justified for any 
other student. They're just not good enough.

It would be unfair if another first-year student as good as Harry was denied 
the chance to play - if Professor Snape had gone to Professor Dumbledore and 
asked that a similar exception be made for Draco Malfoy, then it would be 
horribly unjust if this was not done. But there's absolutely no sign that 
this was even contemplated.

I've mentioned a couple of times now, one of my own schoolmates who was 
given the only exemption in the school concerning the wearing of earrings, 
and he was given it because he was a professional actor the role he was 
undertaking at the time required him to have an earring. Did we think that 
was unfair? I can't speak for everyone, but I certainly didn't - I 
understood there was a special reason for him to have that exemption. I was 
also fairly certain that *if* any other student had been in the same 
situation, they'd have got the same exemption.

Magpie:
> McGonagall pushes him through because she wants him on her
> Quidditch team--and on the best broom she can get for him. Not
> because Harry himself has some urgent need to have a broom
> (like he needs to fly home weekends and care for his strict
> grandmother, or he's a professional flyer in the summer and
> needs to keep in shape, or he's got some medical condition
> where by he has to be airborne several times a week), but
> because she wants to beat everyone at Quidditch. (And from the
> pov of most students it probably also looks like there are
> just special rules for Harry Potter.)

Shaun:

She pushes through the change because he is that good. Yes, she wants him on 
the team - but she wants him on the team because he's a truly exceptional 
player. The two things go together. And, yes, she gets him a broom. 
Normally, I'd object to that - except for one *very* important special 
factor in Harry's case. In loco parentis - Professor McGonagall is in place 
of his parents, and for an orphan, that carries special responsibilities, 
both morally and legally. There's a big difference between being ILP for a 
child who has parents, and having that role for a child who doesn't.  And 
when you look at the situation Harry is in...

Many British boarding schools (and those around the world based on them) 
have a tradition that they will look after the children of ex-pupils who die 
in war. It's a... well, almost a sacred trust - we will look after your 
kids. Harry's parents fell fighting for their society. He needs people 
looking out for him, far more than most kids do.

But, yeah, there are probably some kids who do think there are just special 
rules for Harry Potter. Just as, at my school, there were probably some kids 
who thought there were just special rules for Matthew Newton.

(Of course, today, Matthew Newton is one of the stars of the most popular 
and controversial program on Australian television. He's been nominated for 
at least a Logie (Australia's equivalent of an Emmy) and a Helpmann 
(Australia's equivalent of a Tony). I think most people would now agree the 
school was right to think he had real potential in this area).

Steve replies:
>
> Magpie makes good points here. I understand the "spirit" vs "letter"
> of the law distinctions shaun is mentioning, but I don't think they
> actually apply in this specific case of McG allowing Harry to have
> a really high quality broom in his first year.  I think Magpie is
> right on the mark thinking McGonagall's main motivation is for
> Harry being on the team with the best broom available so that
> McGonagall's "home" Quidditch team has a better chance of winning.
> Of course, it also provides JKR w/ major plot lines for Harry playing
> Quidditch, although perhaps she could have just accomplished that
> by not writing there being a "no first years having brooms" rule.
> I imagine you mean Harry flying home to care for his sick grandmother
> as opposed to his strict grandmother however? :)

Shaun:

I certainly agree that Professor McGonagall wants Harry on the team for 
reasons that aren't entirely about Harry (and are probably more about 
Gryffindor prestige than anything else) but the thing is, that wouldn't be 
an issue if Harry wasn't very good.

My school accepted me as a pupil over and above other students (and later 
gave me a scholarship) out of a fair degree of self interest. They thought 
that having me as a pupil might someday pay dividends for them. They knew 
I'd get good academic results and good academic results help to make the 
school look good. Matthew Newton, I'm sure part of the reason why they were 
willing to accomodate him was the hope that one day, he'd help make the 
school look good as well (I think they might have mixed feelings about him 
at this point...) And there were quite a few others as well - I'd guess at 
least 10% of students. *But* even if that was a large part of the 
motivation, they still gave us what we needed, and for the most part, did 
genuinely seem to care about that as well.

Doing something for the benefit of the House or the benefit of the school 
that isn't in the best interests of a child but only in the interests of 
their school or House is quite different from doing something that is in 
their interests.

Is anyone prepared to argue that Harry would, overall, be better off if he'd 
hadn't been allowed to play Quidditch in First Year? If so, I'd be 
fascinated to hear why, personally.

Magpie:
> No, it's like calling a good natural flier a good natural flier.
> Harry is not being trained to be a professional Quidditch player
> by Hogwarts.

Shaun:

Isn't he?

Where do professional Quidditch players come from? Oliver Wood goes straight 
from Hogwarts into Puddlemere United (their reserve team, admittedly, but 
this does seem to be his intended career). Ginny goes on to play for the 
Holyhead Harpies professionally.

Hogwarts has a duty to train its students for their later careers. For some 
of them, this will be a sporting career.

Again, for real world schools in the same tradition as Hogwarts, this is 
part of their role.

We've just had a series of major news stories here where I am about a 
Melbourne schoolboy in his final year at one of Melbourne's elite schools, 
and one of his school football matches, because he's already been signed to 
a major football team (Jack Watts of Brighton Grammar and the Melbourne 
Demons). There's a boy at my old school in a similar position (though not 
quite as high profile - Dan Hannebery (Xavier College/Sydney Swans), and 
there are numerous similar stories every year.

Hogwarts should be training Harry for any potential career. It should be 
training any of students with any special potentials in any areas in this 
way. That's both a duty of a school, and, once again, entirely consistent 
with real world practice.

Magpie:
> His personal skills are not much interest to anyone beyond
> the inter-house rivalry. They don't buy him a broom because
> he's supposed to be the Mozart of Quidditch. He doesn't
> practice out of some prodigy specific need to have his own
> broom that's the best there is. Viktor Krum is even
> significantly better than he is at the same age so if there's
> anybody who's the Mozart here it's Viktor.

Shaun:

Viktor Krum is about three years older than Harry, not the same age. Is he 
better than Harry? Well, Harry isn't playing international Quidditch at the 
age of 17 - but then again, he's too busy saving the world.

I think it's hard to compare the two although, yes, I think Viktor is 
probably the better of the two. Even out of two brilliant players, one may 
still be more brilliant - but I'm prepared to guess Viktor has had some 
support to get to the level he does as well.

Shaun:
>
> I agree that the simplest way of looking at things seems most useful.

a_svirn:
> Well, it is quite simple for me to assume that McGonagall
> is being her usual irritable self. No need to devise some
> fanfictional Hogwarts dress-code here.

Shaun:

I'm not devising anything 'fanfictional' at all. I'm just arguing for the 
possibility, maybe even the likelihood, that a school in Britain can 
reasonably be assumed to have similar characteristics to schools in Britain 
and assuming that it doesn't to make an argument work is something I find 
rather hard to understand.

a_svirn:
> It sounds like you reserve the right for teachers to insult
> and ridicule students who *do* something wrong.

Shaun:

I believe it is acceptable *in certain circumstances* for a teacher to 
verbally reprimand a student for doing something wrong in a way that the 
student will find unpleasant. I don't, personally, feel that Professor 
McGonagall insulted Parvarti (describing something a child is wearing as 
ridiculous is not the same as calling the child ridiculous) although I think 
I can understand why somebody might feel it's insulting.

I believe what Professor McGonagall said was acceptable in this case - just 
as I believe that if I told a student: "Your language is disgusting." or 
"Your language is offensive." if I caught him swearing is acceptable and 
appropriate in some cases.

*If* Professor McGonagall had called Parvarti herself ridiculous (equivalent 
to me calling a boy disgusting for swearing) my view would be slightly 
different. That's a significantly higher level of 'unpleasantness' and 
while, yes, I do think there are circumstances where it would be justified, 
a minor matter of violating a school uniform code wouldn't normally justify 
it.

a_svirn:
> Eh, what doesn't exist, dress-code in real life English
> Schools? I never pretended anything of the sort. We are
> discussing imaginary Hogwarts however. And that's not the
> point anyway. The point is, you are the one who accuses
> Parvati of violating some hairstyle regulations. The narrator
> does not do it; McGonagall herself does not do it. You do,
> so it is up to you to prove it.

Shaun:

No, that's not what I'm talking about.

I have provided *considerable* documentary evidence supporting my position 
throughout this discussion, both from within the text and external sources. 
Your claim that I am basing my position only on my own experience is 
therefore demonstrably false and that's what I've objected to here. You're 
free to decide that everything I present isn't convincing to you - but don't 
try and claim that I'm only use my only real life experience in discussing 
this. I've provided considerable amounts of quotes from the books, and 
considerable amounts of quotes from elsewhere. You might not find it 
convincing - but it's there for allto see.

a_svirn:
> Seems to me, you refer to the burden of proof, because you can't find
> any except in your real life experience. Which is not at all canon.
> And therefore not at all proof.

Shaun:

I have provided a significant no less than twenty five quotes from the books 
during this discussion - including, for example, every single reference to 
Hermione's hair that I could find in approximately 2,5000 pages of the 
novels, after somebody else - not me - thought it might have relevance. In 
addition to this, I've quoted over one and a half thousand words from other 
sources to back up many of my positions.

I am *not* relying solely on my real life experiences.

I'd like to see you provide some evidence from somewhere for your assertions 
simply because you have made some assertions that I believe are incorrect. 
Most notably, the statement you made that schools outside of somewhere like 
North Korea would not regulate something like hair clips.

Where's the canon argument in that?

You haven't based your arguments solely on canon, either - and I don't think 
that there's any reason you should have to, because I certainly do - but in 
my view, it's reasonable in that case for you to be asked to provide some 
sort of evidence to support your non-canonical conclusions.

Your assumption that this rule could not exist, is every bit as much as an 
assumption as mine that this rule probably does exist.

You can't prove it doesn't from canon. I can't prove it does. But I think 
I've made a great deal more effort to back up position than you have yours.


No, I refer to the burden of proof before as far as I can see, you've based 
your position on nothing more than the way you would

a_svirn:
> What do you mean by "acceptable"? If you are saying that McGonagall
> was within her rights to make Parvati remove the ornament in question,
> then I agree with you. Not because of some obscure hairpins rule of
> which there is no trace in the books, but because, as Pippin pointed
> out, she was acting in loco parentis. Still it was petty of her to
> act that way and insult Parvati.

Shaun:

What do I mean by acceptable? I mean allowable under the rules of the 
school. And if it is allowable under the rules of the school, I don't think 
it's petty on a special occasion. Uniform rules exist in schools for a 
reason. Enforcing them is not petty. If you are not going to enforce them, 
then they become pointless and petty.

Enforced doesn't have to mean at all times, either.

a_svirn:
> That was way later in the fifth book, iirc. And by then Neville had 
> started
> to change under Harry's tutelage.

Shaun:

Harry's teaching of Neville has a lot of positive effects for him, but 
there's no reason to suppose it's dealing with his memory issues at all.

a_svirn:
> After more than two years teaching him how could she possibly
> have missed the fact that he has a very bad memory? And we know
> she does, she make a reference to it when he couldn't hand in
> his permission slip.

Shaun:

Because her classes don't rely heavily on auditory memory. She teaches in a 
much more visual and kinaesthetic way. Neville's problems do not seem to 
impact him heavily when it comes to visual or kinaesthetic memory - and it's 
auditory memory that is tied up with remembering words.

a_svirn:
> "Please, Professor, I-I think I've lost
> "Your grandmother sent yours to me directly, Longbottom,"
> said Professor McGonagall. "She seemed to think it was safer.
> Well, that's all, you may leave."

Shaun:

Nothing there refers to memory - she could just as easily believe the 
concern is Neville's carelessness, rather than his memory. Also "She seemed 
to think it was safer." The way that is phrased is reporting Augusta 
Longbottom's opinion, rather than Professor McGonagall's. We know from 
Neville's post-OWL class choice discussion that Professor McGonagall doesn't 
seem to value Augusta's opinions about Neville's educational capabilities 
particularly highly. As a teacher, I can tell you that parents and guardians 
of children with learning difficulties very often wind up underestimating 
their child's potential and teachers of such students get quite used to 
stretching the children further than the guardians would and finding that 
the child responds positively.

A good teacher listens to what the parents and guardian say - but doesn't 
rely on it as definitive. You don't base your opinion on what the parents 
feel the child can do, you find out for yourself. Neville passes Professor 
McGonagall's classes - either she has put things in place to help him *or* 
he's capable of passing them without help. If it's the former, accusing her 
of the type of neglect you seem to be alleging seems curious. If it's the 
latter, then there's no reason to assume she would be aware of the problem 
he's having outside the classroom

a_svirn:
> Kind of hypocritical of her to punish a student for something she
> is also responsible. I am not saying that Neville had no responsibility
> whatsoever in this case. I am saying that McGonagall's failure to
> acknowledge *her* - in my view the most significant - share of the
> responsibility makes her rather harsh and humiliating punishment
> a classic example of scapegoating.

Shaun:

Hypocritical or not, it's still her job to discpline him. A very common 
experience of schoolboys throughout the centuries is the hypocrisy of being 
punished for smoking by a teacher who gets through forty a day.

If I have a student who hasn't done his homework, how does it help him if I 
let him off scot free because I know I'm behind in my marking? That's 
hypocritical too - but it's not in the best interests of the child for me to 
let him off.


a_svirn:
> Well, she should have. As a head of the house of a child
> with an obvious impairment it was her obligation to make
> reasonable adjustments for such a child. By the way, in real
> life schools in Britain it is unlawful to discriminate against
> children with disabilities, and, yes, not making reasonable
> adjustments counts as discrimination. Unfortunately, as
> I've already said, real life laws and rules do not always
> apply in Hogwarts.

Shaun:

There is a law in Britain that makes it unlawful for schools to discriminate 
against the disabled, yes. It's the Special Educational Needs and Disability 
Act of 2001 - I'm very familiar with it as it happens. Prior to that law 
being passed there was no such law in the UK, so such a law didn't apply in 
Britain at the time of Goblet of Fire.

More importantly, though, speaking as a qualified special education teacher, 
I don't believe that Professor McGonagall's treatment of Neville even comes 
close to violating the law even as it applies now/

The law makes it unlawful for a school to discriminate against disable 
students by treating them less favourably than others. The default 
assumption in the law is that disabled students should be treated *in the 
same way* as non-disabled students. You seem to be arguing that Neville 
should be given special treatment. That is only required by the law in a 
situation where the child might otherwise be substantially disadvantaged.

Neville passes most his classes with acceptable results. It is impossible to 
argue that across his education as a whole he is being substantially 
disadvantaged. It *could* reasonably be argued, I think, that in Potions 
class specifically, he suffers a substantial disadvantage which might mean 
Professor Snape has some legal liability, but not Professor McGonagall.

There's also the issue that under the law, it's unlikely that Neville is 
actually classes as disabled.

"A disabled person is someone who has a physical or mental impairment, which 
has an effect on his or her ability to carry out normal day-to-day 
activities."

Neville doesn't seem to have a problem with normal day to day activities.

Now, yes, I agree that a Head of House *does* have an obligation (whether 
the law says they do or not) to make reasonable adjustments for a child with 
an obvious impediment. I've said that already. The problem with that is, I 
can't see any evidence that Neville's impediment is obvious to Professor 
McGonagall.

He's passing in her classes.

a_svirn:
> And not a single first-year student in more than a century
> was good enough on the broom to be considered safe? Not
> likely. Draco seemed perfectly safe while airborne.

Shaun:

Perfectly safe, yes. But Harry is not just perfectly safe, he's 
exceptionally talented.

a_svirn:
> Where the presumption of innocence is concerned they do have
> exactly the same rights. Under the law children are innocent
> until they are proven guilty just like adults.

Shaun:

We're not talking about a criminal case when it comes to Parvarti, though. 
We're talking about a case of school discipline - which does not require a 
presumption of innocence in law. The allegations being made against 
Professor McGonagall however do rise to the standard that in the real world, 
courts and lawyers would probably be getting involved.

Alla:
> What I am trying to say here Shaun is that while nobody is arguing with 
> you that
> Hogwarts is based on English Boarding school model in general, I would 
> certainly
> disagree with you that every particular detail that is in place or was 
> ever in
> place in English boarding school should apply to Hogwarts.

Shaun:

The point is Alla, that I'm not arguing here about a rule that generally 
applies in British *boarding* schools. Yes, I do think Hogwarts fits that 
model quite well, but in this case, the rule I am discussing is not one that 
is confined to boarding schools. In talking about British schools in this 
particular case, I'm not talking about the relatively small number of 
boarding schools.

It's a rule that is familiar to British children in *most* schools. It is an 
absolutely typical and normal rule. It is so typical and normal that I 
believe most British children who read the passage in question is likely to 
assume that Professor McGonagall *is* enforcing a rule - whether they go to 
an elite boarding school like Eton or Harrow - or if they just go to the 
local comprehensive down the road.

Marianne:
> Shaun, I hope this is part of your post.

Shaun:

It is.

Marianne:
> I have a child that has learning disabilities.  I was guilty
> of standing in the way of allowing him to do things.  I used
> his LD as an excuse, because I was the one that worried too
> much.  I wrapped him in cotton as much as I could.  But when
> he was in school there were times when he had no choice to be
> in with the "normal" kids in classes.  Most teachers expected
> him to do his share, obviously on his learning level, and it
> was the best thing that ever happened to him - and me. My son
> even introduced me to the class rat - something I thought I'd
> never do.  As years have gone by, and he is in a job training
> situation, I've seen him become more and more independant.
>  He does things that I would never let him do.  Like touch a
> stove, etc.  He is not placed in situations that is beyond his
> limits, but he's learning beyond the ones I ever thought he
> could do.  Although he's never left alone - left to run amuck
> as I put it.  I'm darned proud of him and ashamed of myself
> for not allowing him to progress until now.

Shaun:

Thank you for making one of the points I've been trying to make. We don't do 
children with LDs any favours by not letting them do things they are capable 
of, and a lot of them are far more capable than a lot of people think. You 
shouldn't feel ashamed of what you did - you were honestly and sincerely 
acting in what you believed to be your child's best interests - and that is 
what a parent is expected to do.

It's also what we should expect teachers to do - to honestly and sincerely 
act in what they believe to the child's best interest. The difference 
between us and parents is that we have training - or at least some of us 
do - in these areas and so we don't just have to rely on instinct. We're 
also not, normally, as emotionally invested in the process - making a child 
do something that you do might fail to do but knowing it's the only way that 
you and they will find out if they can actually do it is hard enough for a 
teacher who cares about a child, but it's a hundred times harder for a 
parent who actually loves them.

Neville proves to be far, far tougher from Order of the Phoenix onwards than 
I think most people would have thought likely seeing him in Philosopher's 
Stone.

"'He's dot alone!' shouted a voice from above them. 'He's still god be!'

Harry's heart sank. Neville was scrambling down the stone benches toward 
them, Hermione's wand held fast in his trembling hand."

He's injured. He's terrified - and he's still fighting. This is not a child 
who needs to be wrapped in cotton wool.

By Half Blood Prince, he's a leader, he's the person Harry chooses to carry 
on if he, Hermione, and Ron can't.

I assume Neville's grandmother loves him. I certainly hope she does. And 
she's done an incredible thing for him - she's raised him from infancy and 
produced a decent, honest, good boy - with the potential for greatness. 
*But* the Neville we see at 17 is a product of his home - and a product of 
his school as well.

Marianne:
> If muggle schools has LD kids in their system, I wonder if
> Hogwarts would allow LD children in?  Would there be some
> kind of magic to tame down ADHD?  I can't imagine Hogwarts
> could/would ever change a personality of a child.  Muggle
> schools couldn't do it.  Or would parents keep their child
> home.  Sort of like the Kendra/Ariana situation.

Shaun:

I'd like to think Hogwarts could handle such a kid. I don't, unfortunately, 
see much signs that they could.

Of course... there are some things about Hogwarts that might have a positive 
impact on some LDs just accidentally. ADHD students, for example, in general 
benefit from strict teaching, routine, regular exercise, and a school 
environment that is always interesting. Hogwart seems to fit that fairly 
well. They'd probably go off the wall in Professor Binn's classes, though. 
As described, I can't imagine a worse environment for an ADHD child.

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia 




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Mon May 25 12:04:47 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 12:04:47 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <85CD4D9323EA438BAEDD685DBB4CE883@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gve1gv+j9p7@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186746

> Steve replies:
> >
> > Magpie makes good points here. I understand the "spirit" vs "letter"
> > of the law distinctions shaun is mentioning, but I don't think they
> > actually apply in this specific case of McG allowing Harry to have
> > a really high quality broom in his first year.  I think Magpie is
> > right on the mark thinking McGonagall's main motivation is for
> > Harry being on the team with the best broom available so that
> > McGonagall's "home" Quidditch team has a better chance of winning.
> > Of course, it also provides JKR w/ major plot lines for Harry playing
> > Quidditch, although perhaps she could have just accomplished that
> > by not writing there being a "no first years having brooms" rule.
> > I imagine you mean Harry flying home to care for his sick grandmother
> > as opposed to his strict grandmother however? :)
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> I certainly agree that Professor McGonagall wants Harry on the team for 
> reasons that aren't entirely about Harry (and are probably more about 
> Gryffindor prestige than anything else) but the thing is, that wouldn't be 
> an issue if Harry wasn't very good. <snip>
> 

> Is anyone prepared to argue that Harry would, overall, be better off if he'd 
> hadn't been allowed to play Quidditch in First Year? If so, I'd be 
> fascinated to hear why, personally.

a_svirn:
So would I. No one said anything about Harry's being better off without Quidditch. We were discussing McGonagall's less than sterling record where rule enforcement is concerned. 

> a_svirn:
> > Well, it is quite simple for me to assume that McGonagall
> > is being her usual irritable self. No need to devise some
> > fanfictional Hogwarts dress-code here.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> I'm not devising anything 'fanfictional' at all. I'm just arguing for the 
> possibility, maybe even the likelihood, that a school in Britain can 
> reasonably be assumed to have similar characteristics to schools in Britain 
> and assuming that it doesn't to make an argument work is something I find 
> rather hard to understand.

a_svirn:
It does have *some* similar characteristics. And some other characteristics that British schools don't have. However, "possibility", and even "likelihood" is a waaay too long way from "proof". 

> 
> a_svirn:
> > It sounds like you reserve the right for teachers to insult
> > and ridicule students who *do* something wrong.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> I believe it is acceptable *in certain circumstances* for a teacher to 
> verbally reprimand a student for doing something wrong in a way that the 
> student will find unpleasant. I don't, personally, feel that Professor 
> McGonagall insulted Parvarti (describing something a child is wearing as 
> ridiculous is not the same as calling the child ridiculous) <snip>

a_svirn:
I am sure any child would appreciate the distinction. 

> a_svirn:
> > Seems to me, you refer to the burden of proof, because you can't find
> > any except in your real life experience. Which is not at all canon.
> > And therefore not at all proof.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> I have provided a significant no less than twenty five quotes from the books 
> during this discussion - including, for example, every single reference to 
> Hermione's hair that I could find in approximately 2,5000 pages of the 
> novels, after somebody else - not me - thought it might have relevance. In 
> addition to this, I've quoted over one and a half thousand words from other 
> sources to back up many of my positions.
> 
> I am *not* relying solely on my real life experiences.
> 
> I'd like to see you provide some evidence from somewhere for your assertions 
> simply because you have made some assertions that I believe are incorrect. 
> Most notably, the statement you made that schools outside of somewhere like 
> North Korea would not regulate something like hair clips.
> 
> Where's the canon argument in that?


a_svirn:
Huh. It wasn't an "assertion" of anything, Shaun. It amazes me that you could possibly take a phrase like "what is it, North Korea?" as a definitive statement about all boarding schools in the Free World.  Talk about generalisations. I accept that most British schools have uniforms, some of them regulate hairstyles, and sometimes those regulations include things like hairpins or hairclasps. How widespread are those hairclip regulations is another matter. I doubt there is a survey on hairpins as part of uniforms, but I'd be willing to bet that if we were to go to edubase or some other public database and sample randomly say, ten schools out of every county there wouldn't be many schools out there with strict hairpins regulations. 

My reference to North Korea that you chose to interpret literally was about Hogwarts in general and its dress-code in particular not being as totalitarian as you seem to suggest. As for real life British boarding schools, it is a well known fact that people who attended them sometimes compared them with totalitarian states. Take George Orwell, for instance. Or Esmond Rommilly. Hogwarts, however, does not seem nearly as bad as Orwell's St. Cyprian's, or Rommilly's Wellington. 

> Shaun: 
> You haven't based your arguments solely on canon, either - and I don't think 
> that there's any reason you should have to, because I certainly do - but in 
> my view, it's reasonable in that case for you to be asked to provide some 
> sort of evidence to support your non-canonical conclusions.
> 
> Your assumption that this rule could not exist, is every bit as much as an 
> assumption as mine that this rule probably does exist.

a_svirn:
I do not "assume" that "the rule could not exist", I simply state that there is no evidence of its existence in the books. There is, on the other hand an ample body of evidence that Hogwarts students indulge in all kinds of hairstyles that would not pass the muster of some of the real life British schools. Moreover, we have in fact the evidence that Hogwarts uniform requirements do not include hair regulations. In the letter Harry receives in his first year (and that's a general sort of letter that every student receives regardless of gender, presumably) the uniform requirements outlined as follows:

"HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY
 
UNIFORM
 
First-year students will require:
 
1. Three sets of plain work robes (black)
2. One plain pointed hat (black) for day wear
3. One pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar)
4. One winter cloak (black, silver fastenings)
 
Please note that all pupils' clothes should carry name tags"

As you can see, there is nothing there about hairstyles. A good thing too, or Harry would have been forever in trouble for his hereditary messy hair. 

> a_svirn:
> > That was way later in the fifth book, iirc. And by then Neville had 
> > started
> > to change under Harry's tutelage.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Harry's teaching of Neville has a lot of positive effects for him, but 
> there's no reason to suppose it's dealing with his memory issues at all.

a_svirn:
It's dealing with confidence issues to which McGonagall is referring here. 

> a_svirn:
> > After more than two years teaching him how could she possibly
> > have missed the fact that he has a very bad memory? And we know
> > she does, she make a reference to it when he couldn't hand in
> > his permission slip.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Because her classes don't rely heavily on auditory memory. She teaches in a 
> much more visual and kinaesthetic way. Neville's problems do not seem to 
> impact him heavily when it comes to visual or kinaesthetic memory - and it's 
> auditory memory that is tied up with remembering words.

a_svirn:
I don't see how you can convincingly claim that memorising lots of spells, most of them in another language even, does not involve auditory memory. Not that Neville's memory problems are exclusively auditory. 

 
> a_svirn:
> > "Please, Professor, I-I think I've lost
> > "Your grandmother sent yours to me directly, Longbottom,"
> > said Professor McGonagall. "She seemed to think it was safer.
> > Well, that's all, you may leave."
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Nothing there refers to memory - she could just as easily believe the 
> concern is Neville's carelessness, rather than his memory. Also "She seemed 
> to think it was safer." The way that is phrased is reporting Augusta 
> Longbottom's opinion, rather than Professor McGonagall's. 

a_svirn:
Well, Mrs. Longbottom had informed McGonagall of her concerns. She said presumably that it is not *safe* to trust Neville's memory, otherwise she would have given him the form as other parents or guardians did. McGonagall chose to ignore it, and ended up compromising her students' safety. 


> a_svirn:
> > Kind of hypocritical of her to punish a student for something she
> > is also responsible. I am not saying that Neville had no responsibility
> > whatsoever in this case. I am saying that McGonagall's failure to
> > acknowledge *her* - in my view the most significant - share of the
> > responsibility makes her rather harsh and humiliating punishment
> > a classic example of scapegoating.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Hypocritical or not, it's still her job to discpline him. A very common 
> experience of schoolboys throughout the centuries is the hypocrisy of being 
> punished for smoking by a teacher who gets through forty a day.
> 
> If I have a student who hasn't done his homework, how does it help him if I 
> let him off scot free because I know I'm behind in my marking? 

a_svirn:
Your example does not illustrate the argument, because your being behind in your marking has nothing to do with that student's not doing his or her homework. Whereas McGonagall's arrangement had a very direct impact on the Neville's password fiasco.

 
> a_svirn:
> > Well, she should have. As a head of the house of a child
> > with an obvious impairment it was her obligation to make
> > reasonable adjustments for such a child. By the way, in real
> > life schools in Britain it is unlawful to discriminate against
> > children with disabilities, and, yes, not making reasonable
> > adjustments counts as discrimination. Unfortunately, as
> > I've already said, real life laws and rules do not always
> > apply in Hogwarts.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> There is a law in Britain that makes it unlawful for schools to discriminate 
> against the disabled, yes. It's the Special Educational Needs and Disability 
> Act of 2001 - I'm very familiar with it as it happens. Prior to that law 
> being passed there was no such law in the UK, so such a law didn't apply in 
> Britain at the time of Goblet of Fire.

a_svirn:
My point exactly. Real life rules and laws do not apply in Hogwarts. 

> Shaun:
> More importantly, though, speaking as a qualified special education teacher, 
> I don't believe that Professor McGonagall's treatment of Neville even comes 
> close to violating the law even as it applies now/
> 
> The law makes it unlawful for a school to discriminate against disable 
> students by treating them less favourably than others. The default 
> assumption in the law is that disabled students should be treated *in the 
> same way* as non-disabled students. You seem to be arguing that Neville 
> should be given special treatment. That is only required by the law in a 
> situation where the child might otherwise be substantially disadvantaged.

a_svirn:
And I am arguing that it is exactly the situation, because Neville *was* substantially disadvantaged by Sir Cadogan's passwords. 

> Shaun:
> Now, yes, I agree that a Head of House *does* have an obligation (whether 
> the law says they do or not) to make reasonable adjustments for a child with 
> an obvious impediment. I've said that already. The problem with that is, I 
> can't see any evidence that Neville's impediment is obvious to Professor 
> McGonagall.
> 
> He's passing in her classes.

a_svirn:
Barely. And Neville is constantly shown in the books as a walking disaster. If  his problems weren't obvious to her, it is because she chose to interpret them as laziness or carelessness. Which is not very well done of her. 

 
> a_svirn:
> > And not a single first-year student in more than a century
> > was good enough on the broom to be considered safe? Not
> > likely. Draco seemed perfectly safe while airborne.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Perfectly safe, yes. But Harry is not just perfectly safe, he's 
> exceptionally talented.

a_svirn:
But your offered justification for bending the rule in question was that Harry was safe.


> a_svirn:
> > Where the presumption of innocence is concerned they do have
> > exactly the same rights. Under the law children are innocent
> > until they are proven guilty just like adults.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> We're not talking about a criminal case when it comes to Parvarti, though. 
> We're talking about a case of school discipline - which does not require a 
> presumption of innocence in law.

a_svirn:
You were the one who brought it. 

> Shaun:
 The allegations being made against 
> Professor McGonagall however do rise to the standard that in the real world, 
> courts and lawyers would probably be getting involved.

a_svirn:
What allegations? That she is being petty? I don't think it is a matter for lawyers either. 





From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Mon May 25 15:26:07 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 15:26:07 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <85CD4D9323EA438BAEDD685DBB4CE883@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gvedaf+vbca@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186747

> > Magpie:
> > Whoa. Sorry I missed this but wow, this is exactly the kind of thing
> > that would drive me crazy if I was a kid. It's exactly the "spirit of
> > the law" that gets broken by saying that McGonagall's only "bending"
> > it by going to Dumbledore.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Really? Well, I find that odd. Both based on my own expectations of teachers 
> as a child, and in the expectations of the children I teach today. Most 
> children have a reasonably strong sense of what they consider to be right 
> and wrong (which may or may not match the common adult perception of these 
> things) and most children seem to understand that sometimes rules should be 
> bent in order to make things fair.

Magpie:
This isn't about children not understanding that sometimes rules should be bent in order to make things fair. This is about this particular situation *not* being a case of rules "bent" to make anything fair and any kid could see that. The kids have to deal with that since they have no say in the situation, but I don't think they'd also agree to call it that as well.

Substitute situations that are about being fair or general ideas like "zero tolerance" are not relevant. Harry's being given a broom by the school has nothing to do with a zero tolerance policy on anything. I'm not sure why you listed all these examples of school policies being enforced in a ridiculous way (girl suspended for having a nail file) as if their being unfair makes Harry's situation fair. This situation is more like if the school has a zero tolerance on bringing weapons to school, but when Harry gets caught shooting at cans and it turns out he's a good shot his teacher buys him a top of the line gun for himself hoping he'll take out somebody she doesn't like. Because that's only fair?

> Magpie:
> > If the point is safety, then all first years who demonstrate an
> > aptitude for flying should be able to be able to bring a broom
> > (not that Harry even has to bring a broom--he's given a gift of
> > a broom that's better than anyone else's while every other
> > student has to buy their own or use the school brooms). Harry's
> > hardly the first first year at Hogwarts to be able to fly already
> > by the time he gets there. He's not even the only first year who's
> > a good flyer in his own year. If a kid isn't already flying he
> > probably wouldn't have a broom to bring in the first place. So
> > to me the spirit of the rule must be directed at "naturals" like
> > Harry as much as anybody else.
> 
> Shaun:

> The question is, are there any other cases identical to Harry's?
> 
> Harry doesn't just seem to be good on a broom. He seems to be absolutely 
> brilliant. Oliver Wood, the first time he sees Harry practice as a seeker, 
> believes he has the potential to play internationally someday.

Magpie:
There are no other cases that we know of that are identical to Harry's since Harry's special treament is referred to a lot. Lots of kids have the potential to play internationally someday. According to JKR Ginny Weasley does play professionally and the rule isn't waived for her. Nor is Harry's alleged professional potential ever shown to be a motivation for anybody. 

Shaun:
> Harry is the first first year in a century to be selected for his house 
> team. He's not just good - he's truly exceptional. IIRC, the only times 
> Harry fails to get the Snitch in all his time at Hogwarts is in matches 
> where he became unconscious. When he's allowed to play a full game, he wins 
> every time.
> 
> An exception that can be justified for him may not be justified for any 
> other student. They're just not good enough.

Magpie:
Yeah, I noticed Harry never loses anything, really, as long as he's conscious. But canonically, McGonagall doesn't really care one way or the other how Harry nurtures his brilliant talent. She just wants a Seeker for Gryffindor--and she wants him playing on the best broom. Once she gets that, whether Harry reaches his full potential as a professional player is no concern of hers. 

Shaun:
> It would be unfair if another first-year student as good as Harry was denied 
> the chance to play - if Professor Snape had gone to Professor Dumbledore and 
> asked that a similar exception be made for Draco Malfoy, then it would be 
> horribly unjust if this was not done. But there's absolutely no sign that 
> this was even contemplated.

Magpie:
I don't see how the fact that Snape didn't push for special treatment for Draco somehow makes McGonagall's pushing for special treatment for Harry (a student who also happens to be a favorite of Dumbledore's) fair. McGonagall's the one who's specifically looking for a Seeker that year.

Shaun; 
> 
> I've mentioned a couple of times now, one of my own schoolmates who was 
> given the only exemption in the school concerning the wearing of earrings, 
> and he was given it because he was a professional actor the role he was 
> undertaking at the time required him to have an earring. Did we think that 
> was unfair? I can't speak for everyone, but I certainly didn't - I 
> understood there was a special reason for him to have that exemption. I was 
> also fairly certain that *if* any other student had been in the same 
> situation, they'd have got the same exemption.

Magpie:
And as I said, that situation has nothing to do with this one. 

> Shaun:
> 
> She pushes through the change because he is that good. Yes, she wants him on 
> the team - but she wants him on the team because he's a truly exceptional 
> player. The two things go together. And, yes, she gets him a broom. 
> Normally, I'd object to that - except for one *very* important special 
> factor in Harry's case. In loco parentis - Professor McGonagall is in place 
> of his parents, and for an orphan, that carries special responsibilities, 
> both morally and legally. There's a big difference between being ILP for a 
> child who has parents, and having that role for a child who doesn't.  And 
> when you look at the situation Harry is in...

Magpie:
McGonagall does not let Harry break the rule because he's so good his talent must be nurtured and she doesn't buy him a top of the line broom because she's acting as his parent. She lets him play and buys him the broom so that her team can have a Seeker riding on the best broom. This is the reason given in canon. There is no evidence of McGonagall or anyone else at the school feeling a personal responsibility to nurture Harry's personal gifts as a flier. Nor is there any examples of McGonagall acting as a parent in this kind of elaborately generous way. Or really any way. She's not acting as a parent here, she's acting as the house mistress and so "owner" of the Gryffindor team. Thank goodness she isn't claiming to be acting on a sacred trust to look after Harry as a war orphan by buying him the broom and letting him play--the blatant benefits to herself and notable lack of motherly feelings elsewhere would suggest some cynicism.

Shaun: 

> (Of course, today, Matthew Newton is one of the stars of the most popular 
> and controversial program on Australian television. He's been nominated for 
> at least a Logie (Australia's equivalent of an Emmy) and a Helpmann 
> (Australia's equivalent of a Tony). I think most people would now agree the 
> school was right to think he had real potential in this area).

Magpie:
And all the professional Quidditch players from Harry's years were kids who had to wait until second year before they could have their own broom at school. And didn't have the school buying it for them when they did, even if they couldn't afford one themselves. I would say that the school's efforts to foster Harry's great flying talent for its own sake were disappointing, but luckily the school never made any efforts to foster Harry's great flying talent for its own sake. McGonagall just needed a Seeker, saw that Harry the first year had a talent for flying and catching things out of the air, and didn't want to wait until his second year to put him on the team. And while she was at it, might as well put him on the best broom she could.

 
> Steve replies:
> >
> > Magpie makes good points here. I understand the "spirit" vs "letter"
> > of the law distinctions shaun is mentioning, but I don't think they
> > actually apply in this specific case of McG allowing Harry to have
> > a really high quality broom in his first year.  I think Magpie is
> > right on the mark thinking McGonagall's main motivation is for
> > Harry being on the team with the best broom available so that
> > McGonagall's "home" Quidditch team has a better chance of winning.
> > Of course, it also provides JKR w/ major plot lines for Harry playing
> > Quidditch, although perhaps she could have just accomplished that
> > by not writing there being a "no first years having brooms" rule.
> > I imagine you mean Harry flying home to care for his sick grandmother
> > as opposed to his strict grandmother however? :)
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> I certainly agree that Professor McGonagall wants Harry on the team for 
> reasons that aren't entirely about Harry (and are probably more about 
> Gryffindor prestige than anything else) but the thing is, that wouldn't be 
> an issue if Harry wasn't very good.

Magpie:
Aren't entirely about Harry? The only way they're about Harry is that they're about what Harry will do for her. Harry is happy be used this way, of course. I'm not sure why it not being an issue if Harry wasn't good makes any difference. If Harry wasn't good McGonagall wouldn't have seen a Seeker she wanted in him. If this had been taking place in Slytherin with McGonagall as house mistress with the same situation she'd no doubt have gone to Dumbledore for Draco Malfoy and it would have been played as Malfoy getting special treatment that our pov characters don't like as opposed to liking it.

Shaun:
> 
> My school accepted me as a pupil over and above other students (and later 
> gave me a scholarship) out of a fair degree of self interest. They thought 
> that having me as a pupil might someday pay dividends for them.

Shaun:
So since legitimate scholarship programs exist a teacher getting the "no first years may have their own brooms at school" and buying him a top of the line model must be totally like a scholarship program? I don't think so. Any example of favoritism, bias, prejudice or unequal dealings with students could be justified that way.

Shaun:
> 
> Is anyone prepared to argue that Harry would, overall, be better off if he'd 
> hadn't been allowed to play Quidditch in First Year? If so, I'd be 
> fascinated to hear why, personally.

Magpie:
It makes no difference whether Harry would be or not. Nobody's argued that Harry isn't happy to get drafted into McGonagall's Quidditch rivalry with Snape because it's fun. Lots of kids might have been overall better off if they'd been given an expensive broom and allowed to keep it their first year. Why else would they be jealous of Harry?
> 
> Magpie:
> > No, it's like calling a good natural flier a good natural flier.
> > Harry is not being trained to be a professional Quidditch player
> > by Hogwarts.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Isn't he?

Magpie:
No, he isn't. The fact the professional players come from Hogwarts does not mean they are being trained to be professionals at Hogwarts. They're not being trained at all. They don't even have Quidditch coaches. 


> Magpie:
> > His personal skills are not much interest to anyone beyond
> > the inter-house rivalry. They don't buy him a broom because
> > he's supposed to be the Mozart of Quidditch. He doesn't
> > practice out of some prodigy specific need to have his own
> > broom that's the best there is. Viktor Krum is even
> > significantly better than he is at the same age so if there's
> > anybody who's the Mozart here it's Viktor.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Viktor Krum is about three years older than Harry, not the same age. Is he 
> better than Harry? Well, Harry isn't playing international Quidditch at the 
> age of 17 - but then again, he's too busy saving the world.

Magpie:
I said when he was at the same age. Meaning when Harry is 17 there is no indication that he's reached Viktor's level. Even if he wasn't saving the world he wouldn't be playing International Quidditch. He recognizes when he sees the professionals that they play at a much higher level than his team does at Hogwarts. Of course he could still become a professional player, just as Ginny and Oliver do. They'd just have to start seriously training after they left that school.

-m 




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Mon May 25 15:33:38 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 15:33:38 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <85CD4D9323EA438BAEDD685DBB4CE883@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gvedoi+4ued@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186748

Shaun:

She pushes through the change because he is that good. Yes, she wants him on
the team - but she wants him on the team because he's a truly exceptional
player. The two things go together. And, yes, she gets him a broom.
Normally, I'd object to that - except for one *very* important special
factor in Harry's case. In loco parentis - Professor McGonagall is in place
of his parents, and for an orphan, that carries special responsibilities,
both morally and legally. There's a big difference between being ILP for a
child who has parents, and having that role for a child who doesn't. And
when you look at the situation Harry is in...

<SNIP>

Alla:

This example was however brought up to counter your argument about Professor McGonagall never doing something against the rules, no?

I have no problem whatsoever with what she did for all the reasons you described ? that she is in loco parentis for the orphan whose parents died at war that he is indeed that exceptionally good. I also think that Dumbledore better be ready to at least do something like that for Harry that brings him some joy after he put him through ten years of sufferings (those are my reasons of course, I am not saying that you argued all of them). And I will say more ? even if not some but many kids had problems with it, I do not think I would really care. I indeed think that since Harry is that good Professor Dumbledore owes him that little. I am talking here about very specific Harry's case, where Headmaster interfered with his home situation and to me that mean that he took upon himself some very special obligations towards Harry.

And of course my reason would be also that to counter Snape's hate even a little bit, Harry needed this a lot. I mean if McGonagall treated him as Snape treats Draco all the time and would have ordered somebody else to do his spells for Harry for example, as poor Ron had to cut things for Draco, yeah, I would think it is a different story. She however has no problems taking fifty points from Harry when she feels he is truly guilty, so I still think her treatment of her students is significantly less favorable as a whole than Snape's treating of his.

So, absolutely, have no problem with what Minerva did, in fact am very happy with what she did.

HOWEVER, however, I fail to see how anything that you argued or what I just wrote negates the reason why this example was originally brought up ? it DOES show us that when it suits her McGonagall is very willing to go against the rules and no, I do not think it matters much whether she wants to bend rule or break it. As Magpie said, we are not devising imaginary teacher's rulebook and hold McGonagall in violation of it.

I mean, even you agree that she wants him on this team, right? Of course because he is truly exceptional and to me it is good enough, but it is still teacher going to the fullest extent to make sure rule is bended or broken for Harry.

Thus to me this shows that if she would be scolding Parvati for the rule that does not exist, that will not be the first time for her going against the rules.

But of course in any event she was acting in loco parentis, but to me it does not absolve her of charge of being petty.

Shaun:

The point is Alla, that I'm not arguing here about a rule that generally
applies in British *boarding* schools. Yes, I do think Hogwarts fits that
model quite well, but in this case, the rule I am discussing is not one that
is confined to boarding schools. In talking about British schools in this
particular case, I'm not talking about the relatively small number of
boarding schools.

It's a rule that is familiar to British children in *most* schools. It is an
absolutely typical and normal rule. It is so typical and normal that I
believe most British children who read the passage in question is likely to
assume that Professor McGonagall *is* enforcing a rule - whether they go to
an elite boarding school like Eton or Harrow - or if they just go to the
local comprehensive down the road.


Alla:

And I am arguing that not all rules in British Boarding schools or just British Schools are automatically applied in Hogwarts. I argue that there are things that are specific to Hogwarts only, and I also argue that there are things that ANY child in the world would understand and empathize with. Rule about hair could be typical for a lot of British schools, it does not mean to me that it IS the rule in Hogwarts.

A_svirn:
<SNIP>
"HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY

UNIFORM

First-year students will require:

1. Three sets of plain work robes (black)
2. One plain pointed hat (black) for day wear
3. One pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar)
4. One winter cloak (black, silver fastenings)

Please note that all pupils' clothes should carry name tags"

As you can see, there is nothing there about hairstyles. A good thing too, or
Harry would have been forever in trouble for his hereditary messy hair <SNIP>


Alla:

OOOO, this is what I call stellar canon evidence. And in fact I would say that if Hogwarts regulates their students' hair in a any way, shape or form, to me it would make a perfect sense to mention it here for the exact reason you described. I would think that it would have a great comic effect for Harry to worry about how he will deal with his hair while in school, to show him being extra nervous or something. However she mentions nothing of the sort.
So yeah, this is a forbidden " me too" part of the post.






From hagrid_hut at yahoo.com  Mon May 25 05:51:19 2009
From: hagrid_hut at yahoo.com (Jacob Owen)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 22:51:19 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: How important is Hagrid?
In-Reply-To: <gvd6fh+1lhd@eGroups.com>
References: <gvd6fh+1lhd@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <964017.59241.qm@web59701.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186749








--- In HPforGrownups@ yahoogroups. com, Jacob Owen <hagrid_hut@ ...> wrote:

> I wonder how powerful he would have become had he not been expelled
> from Hogwarts??

zanooda:

Well, Hagrid said himself that he "...never was great shakes at magic, really..." :-). OTOH, he had four more years to study. He would have probably gotten an "O" for Care of Magical Creatures and went to work with dragons after school, like Charlie Weasley :-).
?
Hagrid_Hut:
Perhaps he is just one of those people whose time is best spent outside of school.? I guess he doesn't really need to learn magic to defend himself, as we learn of his nearly impenetrable skin (he's thick skinned).
And he DID work with dragons after school--illegally that is :)







[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]




From s_ings at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 00:35:39 2009
From: s_ings at yahoo.com (Sheryll Townsend)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 00:35:39 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvedoi+4ued@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvfdgr+lhor@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186750

> A_svirn:
> <SNIP>
> "HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY
> 
> UNIFORM
> 
> First-year students will require:
> 
> 1. Three sets of plain work robes (black)
> 2. One plain pointed hat (black) for day wear
> 3. One pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar)
> 4. One winter cloak (black, silver fastenings)
> 
> Please note that all pupils' clothes should carry name tags"
> 
> As you can see, there is nothing there about hairstyles. A good thing too, or
> Harry would have been forever in trouble for his hereditary messy hair <SNIP>
> 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> OOOO, this is what I call stellar canon evidence. And in fact I would say that if Hogwarts regulates their students' hair in a any way, shape or form, to me it would make a perfect sense to mention it here for the exact reason you described. I would think that it would have a great comic effect for Harry to worry about how he will deal with his hair while in school, to show him being extra nervous or something. However she mentions nothing of the sort.
> So yeah, this is a forbidden " me too" part of the post.
>

Sheryll:

I don't necessarily see this as evidence that there are no regulations as to hair or hair accessories. All this is is a rudimentary shopping list. It is by no means an inclusive list of what students can bring to school with them. Simply because something isn't mentioned, doesn't mean a reasoned conclusion can't be made. After all, there's no mention of the students showering, but I'd lay odds they don't go dirty all year. 

There are also lots of rules that don't get mentioned in the initial letters to students. Some of them are given by Dumbledore at the Opening Feast. I would imagine that the house prefects are charged with the responsibility of making sure that general school rules are passed on to new arrivals each year. I'm sure someone with experience in that area will correct me if I'm wrong. It's not something I have personal experience with. :)

I think what Shaun is doing is making reasonable assumptions based on both his own knowledge and experience, as well as a reasonable, IMO, assumption of what the author would consider the norm in that type of school setting. 

Sheryll




From ceridwennight at hotmail.com  Tue May 26 01:38:13 2009
From: ceridwennight at hotmail.com (Ceridwen)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 01:38:13 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvfdgr+lhor@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvfh65+t5nm@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186751

Sheryll:
> 
> I don't necessarily see this as evidence that there are no regulations as to hair or hair accessories.

Ceridwen:
Neither do I.  I think there are a lot more drudge rules that we don't know about at Hogwarts that regulate things Harry isn't interested in.  We didn't find out about extra-curricular clubs until Harry went to form one in his fifth year.  There were rules already in place which were augmented by Umbridge's more draconian measures.  Harry won't need to bother about hair ornamentation because he won't be wearing any, so we don't know about it one way or the other.

Sheryll: 
> I think what Shaun is doing is making reasonable assumptions based on both his own knowledge and experience, as well as a reasonable, IMO, assumption of what the author would consider the norm in that type of school setting. 

Ceridwen:
This discussion also reminds me of the dress code rules we had in school.  The school I mean wasn't an exclusive academy, it was taxpayer funded (public for U.S., council school, I guess, for U.K.) and had reams of rules concerning dress, including hair ornamentation, condition, length for boys, styles for both boys and girls, types of stockings girls could wear, even a stipulation against wearing stockings with runs (or ladders) in them.

Our rules were in a handbook passed out at the beginning of the term.  We didn't exactly read all of them, just the ones that we thought might pertain to us.  Some of us didn't read them at all.  We heard about others from other kids.  One of the funniest ways I saw to showcase these rules was when the faculty put on a "fashion show" to demonstrate how not to dress.  It was hilarious to see the girls' vice principal, a mature woman, wearing a micro-mini with window-pane stockings and stiletto heels.  My history teacher was saddled with the nick-name of "Hippie" after he wore a tee-shirt and jeans with holes in them and a waist-length wig.

Some people have said that the WW reminds them of a more old-fashioned world.  If so, I expect that the school rules would follow a more old-fashioned code.  But rules about hair ornamentation aren't just old-fashioned.  The schools around here don't allow hats, they don't allow bandanas worn on the hair, due to gang associations.

I think McGonagall's comment about the clip being ridiculous was supposed to show that everyone was tense.  If she wasn't tense she might have told Parvati to remove the clip without calling it ridiculous.  She might even have drawn her aside and told her confidentially.  I think Hogwarts probably had a lot of rules we never heard about because they didn't directly impact Harry - a rule about the appropriate style of hair clip certainly wouldn't.  I don't think the presence or absence of certain rules would have any bearing on this scene since I think it is there to illustrate the gravity of the situation, the first time this contest has been done in an age of donkey's years.

Ceridwen.




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 01:51:44 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 01:51:44 -0000
Subject: Power of names and Tigana SPOILERS WAS : Re: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gvbubo+hm8e@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvfhvg+h2d2@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186752

Pippin:
I think the idea is to show the difference between a superstitious fear and a
rational precaution, and also the dangerous power of habits and symbols. Saying
the name had no magical effect whatever until after the Ministry takeover, and
Dumbledore encouraged it as a minor act of defiance against Voldemort. Very few
people would actually have the magical strength or the opportunity to battle
with Death Eaters, but anyone, even a child, could say the name. But when
Voldemort actually had the power to put a trace on people who said it, the fact
that only a few people had ever followed Dumbledore's lead in this made them
vulnerable, and they needed to stop saying the name.

 
Alla:

I suppose this is one of the motives that I expected to play out more than a minor act of defiance against Voldemort. As I am sure you know power of names is extremely common motive in fantasy and IMO this is one of the motives which never gets old, because it resonates with real life power of names if that makes sense.
I think it makes sense that when Indian tribes or African tribes called their young ones long names, that very often kids wanted to become what they were called. Because as somebody told me if you are called Brave warrior or Smart mouth every day of your life, that's whom you eventually would want to become. 

Anyway, so often in fantasy if you know wizard's true name, often it gives the enemies additional power, right? I was just thinking that JKR may want to explore this motive. I am not saying that she should have of course, but I just feel that she opened the door to it, but then changed the direction. Which is of course is her right, all that I am saying that to me these two moments do not go well together.

In Tigana the whole plot sprays from the idea that evil  wizard cast a spell that made it impossible for the people who were not born in the country to hear and say the name of the country. And basically the idea was that when everybody who was born there dies, the country will disappear, even though it is still on the map, you know? It is beautiful, it is extremely powerful, and I just think that power of names is something more than minor thing.

JKR opened the door in my opinion to the power of name being something evil in this instance that has a hold over people, I just thought that it will play out as something that will be broken.

Pippin:
Being able to say the name did not give Harry any special power, beyond
impressing people who were afraid to say it and antagonizing DE's. But Harry had
unconsciously started to regard his ability to say it as a kind of talisman,
IMO, and it became a habit that he found hard to break.

Alla:

Well, yes and I am saying that I thought it will give him some powers, but even if not, it gave people extra confidence, extra bravery, no?

And yes, exactly I just did not expect that this was the habit he would **have to** learn how to break. From Dumbledore's earlier teachings I expected exactly the opposite.




lizzyben:

But was it ever an irrational superstition? This is the magical world, after
all, where spoken words can have instantaneous results in the real world. So
ultimately, saying "You-Know-Who" wasn't a silly superstition at all, but a
rational precaution. And if the "taboo" was a known spell, it seems like DD
should have been aware of the potential danger, as almost everyone else seemed
to be.

Alla:

Oh I agree with you that it is so often not an irrational superstition in magical worlds, but I agree with Pippin that apparently it was till they placed that Taboo spell. 

Lizzyben:
But wasn't "Tom Riddle" his proper name, after all? What I think is strange is
that Dumbledore insisted on making everyone else call him "Lord Voldemort". But
that was the name Tom Riddle had created for *himself*, the self-glorifying,
terrifying name he wanted to be known as. Yet Dumbledore himself called him
"Tom" - which was a much more effective way of reducing him down to size &
taking away the fake persona Riddle had created. <SNIP>

Alla:

Here I absolutely agree with you. I would think that Dumbledore would make sure that every paper of the WW, at least when he was still that influential, I do know that he could not do it in OOP, would print a story of who Lordie dear really was, that all he was is a half blood named Tommy Riddle. Something tells me that many purebloods just may have some hesitations about throwing themselves at his feet. I think it would have make them think twice about doing that since supposed pureblood champion is not a pureblood at all. I do wonder why exactly Dumbledore did not scream at the top of his lungs the truth of who Tom Riddle really was. I am wondering if Dumbledore was so deep into his secrets that he thought that this will be something the world better not know, just as when he did not share his suspicions about Tom with anybody while he was still in school.

Lizzyben:
<SNIP>
To me, it's sort of like as if Harry said something about that jerk Snape,
and DD gently insisted that Harry call Snape by his proper name: "The Half-Blood
Prince!"

Alla:

LOLOL. Yes I can buy this analogy.


Pippin:

Voldemort wasn't trying to scare people out of saying "Tom." But I think
Dumbledore didn't want to make an issue of Riddle's bloodline. There were some
people who wouldn't have trusted Voldemort if they'd known he was once Tom
Riddle -- but Dumbledore did not think that would be a good reason not to trust
someone.

Alla:

Huh? I totally think as I said above that many purebloods would have left Voldemort if they knew that he was really Tom and it seems to me that you agree, right? Are you saying that Dumbledore thought that this reason is not NOBLE enough to not trust a person or something along these lines? Or are you saying something different? Because if this is what you are arguing Dumbledore is thinking, I can only shake my head (at Dumbledore, not at you of course). Dumbledore is not beyond forcing a man to do anything, anything for him in exchange for protection of the woman he loves, he is not beyond of forcing that  same man to kill him. And hey, who but that man is better qualified to decide if something happens to his soul, but Dumbledore still wants him to do it. And hey, while I personally still find Dumbledore's methods totally disgusting here, it is for the good of the cause, getting rid of the Voldemort, etc. But Dumbledore thinks it is not good to use any methods to make sure the number of Voldemort's followers will decrease?

JMO,

Alla






From horridporrid03 at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 02:13:39 2009
From: horridporrid03 at yahoo.com (horridporrid03)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 02:13:39 -0000
Subject: Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)
In-Reply-To: <gv2glh+m9ku@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvfj8j+oopn@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186753

> >>Betsy Hp:
> > I don't think it's left for the reader, actually.  Certainly a reader *can* go back and reexamine the times Harry may have stumbled, but since the context is never changed (Draco is never recast as a victim in the ferret scene; Harry casting the cruciatus is never written as a moral mistake) I believe they're going against the text when they do so.  I think the reader is expected to just follow along after Harry and adopt his views as their own.  Especially by series end when he has it all figured out.

> >>Carol responds:
> Quite possibly it depends on the reader. But even an unsophisticated eleven-year-old kid reading GoF for the second time will see him differently now that he knows that "Moody" is a Death Eater. Older, more sophisticated readers will certainly question any of Moody's actions that seemed okay to them at the time and rethink them in relation to his real motives. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
But they don't.  And those that didn't had a better read, I thought, on how the books turned out. (Draco never was redeemed, Harry never did have to rethink the way he interacted with him.)

> >>Carol:
> True, *Harry* doesn't rethink the punishment, but the time has not yet come for him to reassess Draco or for Draco himself to change. We can't expect Harry at fourteen to apply the insights that he will gain from seeing Draco failing to kill Dumbledore in HBP and being forced to Crucio fellow DEs in DH. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
You're right, we can't.  We *can* however (imo), expect Harry to have a moment where he feels uncomfortable about feeling positive about a teacher partly because that teacher smeared a student Harry disliked.  Maybe feel a twinge of sympathy (just a twinge, mind) for Draco being mistreated by a Death Eater Harry was chummy with.  But he doesn't rethink this incident at all.

> >>Carol:
> As for Fake!Moody, there's no point in *Harry's* reassessing his actions. Harry knows what he really was, and he's no longer a threat. He has other things to think about, and other lessons to learn. 
> <snip>

Betsy Hp:
See, that's what bothers me.  Harry witnessed something that in retrospect should have been at least bothersome (hopefully a bit horrifying): a sadistic Death Eater taking his ire out on a school boy.  And Harry wasn't only not bothered by it at the time; it was something he was okay with (if not a bit pleased).  And even after the reveal he never thinks of it.  To my mind there's *tons* of reasons for Harry to reassess *his own* reactions to Barty Jr's actions.  To dismiss it as a lesson not worth learning (and I agree, this is how the text puts it across) is massively problematic to my mind.

> >>Carol:
> There are, no doubt, readers who still approve of the bouncing ferret incident and still think it's funny. But I don't think that's how JKR expects the thoughtful and observant reader to feel.

Betsy Hp:
Why? What in the text indicates to you that JKR expects us to revisit the scene?  She never revisits it as an author.

> >>Carol, who thinks that we *have* to read against the text because we, as readers, know more than Harry does and we can't fully trust his pov or his opinions until the epilogue (and we can choose to disagree with him even then)

Betsy Hp:
There are mysteries to be solved, yes, and the reader can read deeper into the text than Harry can (handicapped by being an actual player on the page, as he is *g*), but to actually read against the text?  I don't think that's what JKR was aiming for.  Rereading the scene and feeling disturbed at what Barty Jr was doing would generally lead (I'd think) to sympathy for Draco.  Yet JKR seemed surprised whenever confronted with that view.

If JKR wanted the reader to rethink the scene, casting Draco as a victim of a Death Eater rather than a bully getting his just desserts from a cool adult figure (like Dudley and Hagrid and the pig-tail), she'd have done so herself.  To leave it entirely up to the reader, but to never give them textual support later on... it's purely conjecture.  And it's very unkind of JKR; all tease, no follow-through. ;)  

> >>Pippin:
> <snip>
> It's a defining fact of human nature that we are able to learn from other people's mistakes. I don't find it a stretch to suppose that Harry learned from Snape and Dumbledore. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
I'm sure he learned something from examining their lives.  The text shows him doing so.  It doesn't show Harry reexamining his own life, though.

> >>Pippin:
> Why would Harry think that a wealthy, popular, much-loved student couldn't abuse his power? James did. Dumbledore did. That Harry has done well for himself would not convince him that he could never go wrong. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
Harry doesn't see himself go wrong, though. Yes, he sees the mistakes others make, but he doesn't examine himself, doesn't catch his own mistakes. His father could abuse his power as the big man on campus, but Harry doesn't notice when he's doing the same.  I don't think the reader is supposed to either.

Betsy Hp




From horridporrid03 at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 02:54:29 2009
From: horridporrid03 at yahoo.com (horridporrid03)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 02:54:29 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gv26qo+uh3h@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvfll5+nl6l@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186754

> >>jkoney:
> <snip> I still don't agree with the fact that none of the Malfoy's were sent to prison for at least some punishment.

Betsy Hp:
Are we ever told they weren't? *is curious*  But yes, we're not told that they were.  I think we're supposed to pretty much forget about the Malfoys in the end. Maybe as failed also-rans to the more effective Death Eaters?

> > >Betsy Hp:
> > <snip> As someone who grew up with "Malory Towers" (a "school-days" series) Draco seemed prime to become Harry's best friend. Everything about our first scene with him screamed "learning moment to come".  So that's an example of my personal experience trumping what the author was trying to get across.

> >>jkoney:
> Aren't you then ignoring what was written?

Betsy Hp:
No, because what was written fit the trope so well. I do agree that my personal experience led me in a different direction than JKR was meaning to direct me, but I wasn't completely ignoring the text.  I just interpreted it differently.

> >>jkoney:
> If not at that point, which I didn't read as generously as you did, what about the train scene? Draco insults Ron and then threatens Harry about meeting the same end as his parents. I definitely think the author is trying to say that these two aren't going to be friends.

Betsy Hp:
Draco insults Ron after Ron snickers over his name (in retrospect an odd action considering common wizard names) and he threatens Harry after Harry shames him.  Seemed like children acting like children to me.  Nothing that couldn't be fixed with a good adventure and some growing moments. :)  (The trope was still being well followed.)

> >>Betsy Hp
> > <snip> And there was the fact that when he had the ammunition to get Harry kicked out of school (the hidden dragon plot), Draco chose not to use it.  It seemed so obvious he was still wanting to be friends... <snip>

> >>jkoney:
> You thought he still wanted to be friends with Harry? 

Betsy Hp:
Yes. :)  Otherwise, why not spill the beans?  (That's actually a lingering question: why didn't Draco tell? The "he wanted to capture them himself," response is only reasonable if we totally ignore Draco's character. Really, Draco's constant hovering around Harry over the years is hard to explain.)

> >>jkoney:
> JKR has Draco threaten Harry: "I'd be carful if I were you , Potter."
> "Unless youre a bit politer you'll go the same way as your parents. They didn't know what was good for them, either."
> To me that was the gauntlet being thrown down. I'm not sure she could have been much more direct about how we were supposed to view Draco.

Betsy Hp:
Oh yes, Draco definitely threw down a gauntlet.  I just thought it was a gauntlet foreshadowing a story and life lesson.  Instead it was just...  well, it didn't really turn out to be all that much, did it?  Draco doesn't really effect Harry's life much, especially after PS/SS.  Rather than a gauntlet I think this was just the beginning of a series of annoyances as Draco buzzed around Harry, distracting him from the actual storyline.

> >>Alla:
> Heh, just as I could never understand where this argument of Draco not really being loved by his parents comes from.
> <snip>
> Brooms for whole team? Here you go Draco, have them.
> <snip>
> Narcissa would not let her baby to go far away from her, won't she? I thought it is totally a sign of spoiled mama boy that she won't let him go to Durmstrang.
> <snip>

Betsy Hp:
Oh, I'm talking about the very first book, before we ever meet Lucius and Narcissa.  It wasn't that I was thinking Draco was an abused little woobie, I just saw that what he was saying wasn't matching his circumstances.  His doting parents weren't there doting on him (and frankly, Narcissa should have been; her baby going away for the first time? she should have stuck to him like glue).  His very-important-father couldn't bend the rules and get in a broom for Draco in his first year.  What Draco was bragging about wasn't born out by the text and I thought that meant something.  (I was totally, totally wrong, of course.  But that was my theory. *g*)

> >>Alla:
> Oh and yes, I agree that Draco wanted to be friends with Harry, I just never thought that it was for any other reason than to make Lucius' even more proud of Draco.

Betsy Hp:
Draco is the only character who ever wanted to be friends with a knobby-kneed boy with glasses.  Everyone else was thrilled to be meeting "The Boy Who Lived!".  Draco wanted to make friends because he wanted to make friends.  It never meant anything in the end, but I thought that it would. *is sad*

Interestingly, when his father flat out tells him to suck up to Harry, Draco does the opposite. (One more reason I *still* find Draco adorable.  *squishes him*)

Montavilla47:
> <snip>
>So, yes, I was one of those who thought there was going to
be more to Draco than just an unpleasant bully. I was wrong,
but at least I was in good company.

Betsy Hp:
I love the fact that Draco was such a big hit to such a solid segment of readers. :) Draco and Snape have lead to some great connections.

Betsy Hp




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Tue May 26 03:02:55 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 03:02:55 -0000
Subject: Power of names and Tigana SPOILERS WAS : Re: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gvfhvg+h2d2@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvfm4v+lnip@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186755


> Alla:
> 
> Huh? I totally think as I said above that many purebloods would have left Voldemort if they knew that he was really Tom and it seems to me that you agree, right? Are you saying that Dumbledore thought that this reason is not NOBLE enough to not trust a person or something along these lines?

Pippin:
I am not saying Dumbledore is too noble to think of it. I am saying he would realize it wouldn't work -- of course he would not be above giving a noble reason, if somebody asked :)

 Look at it this way, suppose I am an official with a government, a government that has anti-Semitic tendencies which I have spent most of my life working against. I suspect  some fellow  named Madison of running a Ponzi scheme, and  I can't get anyone to believe me. Now in this very hypothetical case, I think  that a lot of his investors wouldn't care to do business with a Jew -- so what you are saying is, I should tell everyone that Madison's name used to be Madoff, right?

Wouldn't my political enemies use that as  ammunition? Wouldn't they claim that my actions show  that, hey, even I must agree  that being Jewish is a legitimate reason not to trust people?  

If anyone did avoid investing with Madison, not because he was a crook but because he was a Jew,  I'd have  helped  anti-Semites to profit from their anti-Semitism,   and at the same time I'd destroy  my own standing as a fighter against anti-Semitism. Maybe Madison's scheme would collapse a bit sooner than it would have anyway, but is that worth the harm I'd do by lending support to those who distrust Jews? 

And as Madison is a very plausible and conscienceless liar, he would surely convince many of his clients that I was making it up anyway, in which case I would have discredited myself for nothing. 

Pippin







From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Tue May 26 03:21:34 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 03:21:34 -0000
Subject: Power of names and Tigana SPOILERS WAS : Re: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gvfm4v+lnip@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvfn7u+qrvg@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186756

> Pippin:

>  Look at it this way, suppose I am an official with a government, a government that has anti-Semitic tendencies which I have spent most of my life working against. I suspect  some fellow  named Madison of running a Ponzi scheme, and  I can't get anyone to believe me. Now in this very hypothetical case, I think  that a lot of his investors wouldn't care to do business with a Jew -- so what you are saying is, I should tell everyone that Madison's name used to be Madoff, right?
> 
> Wouldn't my political enemies use that as  ammunition? Wouldn't they claim that my actions show  that, hey, even I must agree  that being Jewish is a legitimate reason not to trust people? 

Magpie:
I think Tom Riddle's blood would only be of secondary importance anyway. The important reason to call him Riddle, as Dumbledore and Harry both do, is to make him human and cut him down to size rather than referring to him by his scary goth name he uses to make him sound unbeatable. Not only would it work, it's imo something that should definitely be given to everyone. That line of Dumbledore's is very bizarre to me, that his "proper name" isn't You-Know-Who, but Lord Voldemort. His proper name is Tom Riddle from Little Hangledon.

If some people who were already obsessed with bloodline happened to also be turned off by his Muggle parents all the better, but there's more to Tom Riddle than his blood status. Besides which, it's the truth that Voldemort doesn't want known so why not share it? The inner circle all know it.

-m




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 10:40:42 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 10:40:42 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvfdgr+lhor@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvggva+jn7g@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186757

> Sheryll:
> 
> I don't necessarily see this as evidence that there are no regulations as to hair or hair accessories. All this is is a rudimentary shopping list. It is by no means an inclusive list of what students can bring to school with them. Simply because something isn't mentioned, doesn't mean a reasoned conclusion can't be made. After all, there's no mention of the students showering, but I'd lay odds they don't go dirty all year. 

a_svirn:
I'd say it's a pretty inclusive list. What's showering has to do with uniforms? You don't need include shampoo and soap into the list of uniform requirements, it's absurd. But if you are getting your kid ready for a boarding school with specific (and very strict) hair regulations you need to know what they are. If you son sport dreadlocks and the school requires all boys to have a neat short haircut you'd have to take him to the barbers. If the school requires girls' bands, Alice bands and hairclips to be of specific colour you'd need to buy all those items, wouldn't you? Or some of them. 

> Sheryll: 
> There are also lots of rules that don't get mentioned in the initial letters to students. Some of them are given by Dumbledore at the Opening Feast. 

a_svirn:
What rules? That the Forbidden Forest and a certain corridor are forbidden? You don't include thing like that into a list of uniform requirement either. As for dungbombs and other Zonko products, not only it has nothing to do with uniforms, parents only need to have some rudimentary common sense to know that things like dungbombs aren't something you should equip your kid with. 







From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 11:00:01 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 11:00:01 -0000
Subject: Power of names and Tigana SPOILERS WAS : Re: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gvfm4v+lnip@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvgi3h+c57p@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186758

> Pippin:
>  Look at it this way, suppose I am an official with a government, a government that has anti-Semitic tendencies which I have spent most of my life working against. I suspect  some fellow  named Madison of running a Ponzi scheme, and  I can't get anyone to believe me. Now in this very hypothetical case, I think  that a lot of his investors wouldn't care to do business with a Jew -- so what you are saying is, I should tell everyone that Madison's name used to be Madoff, right?
> 
> Wouldn't my political enemies use that as  ammunition? Wouldn't they claim that my actions show  that, hey, even I must agree  that being Jewish is a legitimate reason not to trust people?  

a_svirn:
Then again, once the bubble were burst and all those anti-Semitic investors, their children and grandchildren, their employees and families of those employees were broke, they would have even greater political ammunition against Jewish people. Wouldn't they? In fact it wouldn't be a stretch if they grabbed pitchforks and went after all Jews they could find, crooks or not. 

> Pippin:
> If anyone did avoid investing with Madison, not because he was a crook but because he was a Jew,  I'd have  helped  anti-Semites to profit from their anti-Semitism,   and at the same time I'd destroy  my own standing as a fighter against anti-Semitism. Maybe Madison's scheme would collapse a bit sooner than it would have anyway, but is that worth the harm I'd do by lending support to those who distrust Jews? 
> 
> And as Madison is a very plausible and conscienceless liar, he would surely convince many of his clients that I was making it up anyway, in which case I would have discredited myself for nothing. 
> 

a_svirn:
So what's your preferable solution to the problem would be? Let the crook run his Ponzi scheme, let anti-Semitic investors go bankrupt (and all the other investors as well)? Let the ineffectual government of which you are an official collapse in the face of public anger? I am not sure it would help Jewish people any. 

However, it wouldn't surprise me if Dumbledore did indeed think along those lines. He wasn't after all interested in the strong effective government. The weaker the Ministry was, the stronger was his position as a leader of his merry band of vigilantes. He certainly did nothing to help Scrimgeour, even though he too wanted to stop Voldemort. 





From s_ings at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 11:56:24 2009
From: s_ings at yahoo.com (Sheryll Townsend)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 04:56:24 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
Message-ID: <64027.64501.qm@web63407.mail.re1.yahoo.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186759


> > Sheryll:
> > 
> > I don't necessarily see this as evidence that there
> are no regulations as to hair or hair accessories. All this
> is is a rudimentary shopping list. It is by no means an
> inclusive list of what students can bring to school with
> them. Simply because something isn't mentioned, doesn't mean
> a reasoned conclusion can't be made. After all, there's no
> mention of the students showering, but I'd lay odds they
> don't go dirty all year. 
> 
> a_svirn:
> I'd say it's a pretty inclusive list. What's showering has
> to do with uniforms? You don't need include shampoo and soap
> into the list of uniform requirements, it's absurd. But if
> you are getting your kid ready for a boarding school with
> specific (and very strict) hair regulations you need to know
> what they are. If you son sport dreadlocks and the school
> requires all boys to have a neat short haircut you'd have to
> take him to the barbers. If the school requires girls'
> bands, Alice bands and hairclips to be of specific colour
> you'd need to buy all those items, wouldn't you? Or some of
> them. 
> 
Sheryll again:

It's not at all an inclusive list. I see no mention of undergarments (which I'll agree wouldn't be regulated) or shoes, which I think would have *some* guidelines. I think it's safe to assume they don't go barefoot, so they are required to bring shoes. I also think it's safe to assume that the guidelines for everyday footwear don't include stiletto heels, which would be highly improper for classes like Herbology or Care of Magical Creatures. What is provided with the Hogwarts letter is a list of items the students would likely need to *purchase*, things they probably don't already have at home. Even Draco, coming from a well-to-do family, is seen going to Madame Malkin's to buy the necessary robes.

So JKR didn't draft a student handbook for us to read. I think it's safe to say something of the sort exists, either written to be handed to the students on arrival or verbally provided by prefects. 

Students will bring things other than what is required as uniform. Most of them will already know, either from relatives, neighbours or friends, that there will be occasions when uniforms aren't worn and pack accordingly. I imagine some leeway is granted, for example, to student who don't go home over breaks. 

The point of my mentioning students bathing isn't to point out that personal hygiene items aren't on the list but to point out that there are lots of things that JKR simply doesn't write about. She doesn't write about them brushing their teeth, but I would think that they do. 

> > Sheryll: 
> > There are also lots of rules that don't get mentioned
> in the initial letters to students. Some of them are given
> by Dumbledore at the Opening Feast. 
> 
> a_svirn:
> What rules? That the Forbidden Forest and a certain
> corridor are forbidden? You don't include thing like that
> into a list of uniform requirement either. As for dungbombs
> and other Zonko products, not only it has nothing to do with
> uniforms, parents only need to have some rudimentary common
> sense to know that things like dungbombs aren't something
> you should equip your kid with. 
> 
Sheryll: 

Ah, but that's just my point. There are rules for students that aren't mentioned on a short shopping list. Those rules can, and likely do, include a range of things. It's those rules that are passed on at school that might include, IMO, guidelines as to what is acceptable when. Sure, the girls might bring make-up and hair accessories, not all of which would be appropriate for everyday wear.

While it's fine to say that they were provided with a list of what to bring, I don't think it's also possible to extrapolate that these are the only items that are part of their uniforms. I believe it's more reasonable to assume that this is just the list of things they'll have to go out and purchase for first year. They don't need to purchase pyjamas, undergarments, socks and shoes, or hair accessories. They already own them. Whether they choose to pack and bring items that might not be appropriate for everyday wear is up to them. If they bring and wear those items when they shouldn't, they should expect to be reprimanded or punished. 

Sheryll


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From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 12:57:02 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 12:57:02 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <64027.64501.qm@web63407.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <gvgouu+sqe9@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186760

> Sheryll again:
> 
> It's not at all an inclusive list. I see no mention of undergarments (which I'll agree wouldn't be regulated) 

a_svirn:
Exactly. If they aren't regulated there is no need to include them into the list headlined "Uniform".


> Sheryll
or shoes, which I think would have *some* guidelines. I think it's safe to assume they don't go barefoot, so they are required to bring shoes. I also think it's safe to assume that the guidelines for everyday footwear don't include stiletto heels, which would be highly improper for classes like Herbology or Care of Magical Creatures. 

a_svirn:
I am not sure it is a good example either. I can't see any parents buying their eleven year old daughter stilettos. But a pretty butterfly hairclip? Why not? As I said, if there are hair and hair accessories regulation in a given school, parents need to know about them *before* they send their kid there. 


> Sheryll: 
> So JKR didn't draft a student handbook for us to read. I think it's safe to say something of the sort exists, either written to be handed to the students on arrival or verbally provided by prefects. 

a_svirn:
Not where uniforms are concerned. What were a perfect to do if all my hair accessories turned out to be not acceptable? Punish me every time I wore them? And scold me for being untidy every time I did not wear them? I guess in Hogwarts they could practice transfiguration on them, but still wouldn't it be more reasonable to include things like that in the list of uniform requirements? 

> Sheryll:
> The point of my mentioning students bathing isn't to point out that personal hygiene items aren't on the list but to point out that there are lots of things that JKR simply doesn't write about. 

a_svirn:
However, she did write about Hogwarts uniform requirements. She specifically devised a list of them.

 
> Sheryll: 
> While it's fine to say that they were provided with a list of what to bring, I don't think it's also possible to extrapolate that these are the only items that are part of their uniforms. 

a_svirn:
I think it is possible. Even necessary. I would certainly be more than a little miffed if I didn't buy for my kid something that is required or, alternatively, bought something that specifically forbidden by the school rules, only because the administration didn't bother to list it together with other requirements.       





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Tue May 26 14:05:29 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 14:05:29 -0000
Subject: Power of names and Tigana SPOILERS WAS : Re: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gvgi3h+c57p@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvgsv9+sjst@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186761


> a_svirn:
> Then again, once the bubble were burst and all those anti-Semitic investors, their children and grandchildren, their employees and families of those employees were broke, they would have even greater political ammunition against Jewish people. Wouldn't they? In fact it wouldn't be a stretch if they grabbed pitchforks and went after all Jews they could find, crooks or not. 

Pippin:
That's a concern, certainly. But if people drive a Jew out of business not because he's a crook but because he's Jewish, isn't the next step to drive all the Jews out of business? With pitchforks if necessary?

> a_svirn:
> So what's your preferable solution to the problem would be? Let the crook run his Ponzi scheme, let anti-Semitic investors go bankrupt (and all the other investors as well)? Let the ineffectual government of which you are an official collapse in the face of public anger? I am not sure it would help Jewish people any. 

> 
> However, it wouldn't surprise me if Dumbledore did indeed think along those lines. He wasn't after all interested in the strong effective government. The weaker the Ministry was, the stronger was his position as a leader of his merry band of vigilantes. He certainly did nothing to help Scrimgeour, even though he too wanted to stop Voldemort


Pippin:
I would do exactly what I would do in the case of a suspected Ponzi artist who wasn't Jewish:  show that he couldn't possibly get the return he was claiming to get with the methods he was claiming he used to get it. I believe that was Dumbledore's objection to Scrimgeour as well. 

Pippin






From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 14:40:44 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 14:40:44 -0000
Subject: Power of names and Tigana SPOILERS WAS : Re: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gvgsv9+sjst@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvgv1c+nnam@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186762

> > a_svirn:
> > So what's your preferable solution to the problem would be? Let the crook run his Ponzi scheme, let anti-Semitic investors go bankrupt (and all the other investors as well)? Let the ineffectual government of which you are an official collapse in the face of public anger? I am not sure it would help Jewish people any. 
> 
> > 
> > However, it wouldn't surprise me if Dumbledore did indeed think along those lines. He wasn't after all interested in the strong effective government. The weaker the Ministry was, the stronger was his position as a leader of his merry band of vigilantes. He certainly did nothing to help Scrimgeour, even though he too wanted to stop Voldemort
> 
> 
> Pippin:
> I would do exactly what I would do in the case of a suspected Ponzi artist who wasn't Jewish:  show that he couldn't possibly get the return he was claiming to get with the methods he was claiming he used to get it. I believe that was Dumbledore's objection to Scrimgeour as well. 
> 

a_svirn:
I don't see that. We have no reason to believe that Scrimgeour was anti-Muggle. Nor Voldemort was someone who abused the rules of legitimate business. It's not like exposing a Dark Lord who went bad might have proved detrimental to all those honest and hardworking dark lords who hadn't done anything wrong. 




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Tue May 26 14:43:32 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 14:43:32 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gvfll5+nl6l@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvgv6k+huef@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186763

 
> Betsy Hp:
> Are we ever told they weren't? *is curious*  But yes, we're not told that they were.  I think we're supposed to pretty much forget about the Malfoys in the end. Maybe as failed also-rans to the more effective Death Eaters?
> 

Pippin:
If JKR wanted us to forget the Malfoys, she wouldn't have put them in the epilogue. People who think they were unredeemed seem to be unhappy that they weren't explicitly punished, so I don't think they had a more satisfying read. 


> 
> Betsy Hp:
> No, because what was written fit the trope so well. I do agree that my personal experience led me in a different direction than JKR was meaning to direct me, but I wasn't completely ignoring the text.  I just interpreted it differently.
> 

Pippin:
It only fits the trope if you ignore the existence of Ron. I think a lot of people would like to do that, because while he works very well as a character in a book, he's not so much fun in a fantasy based on the book. I mean, when we used to play LOTR, nobody wanted to be Sam, and I think Ron has the same problem. Harry's the Chosen One, Hermione's the smartest witch ever, and Ron's just...Ron. He's not, y'know, cool. Shabby clothes, dumpy mom, weirdo dad, same old issues all the time, and when he does save the day, nobody's looking.  


Whereas redeemed characters get all the snide sarcastic lines, and  every knows that if  they  don't die they're bound to become the hero's blood-brother. Edmund is not supposed to be saved from the White Witch and go on being a pill. Except...why couldn't that happen?

> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Yes. :)  Otherwise, why not spill the beans?  (That's actually a lingering question: why didn't Draco tell? The "he wanted to capture them himself," response is only reasonable if we totally ignore Draco's character. Really, Draco's constant hovering around Harry over the years is hard to explain.)
> 

Pippin:
Telling on Hagrid wouldn't get Harry in trouble. Draco had to catch Harry without any adults to take the blame instead. But he was a little too late, and McGonagall didn't believe there was a dragon at all.

In HBP,  Harry leads Draco's life for him, following Draco around, trying to get him in trouble, casting minor hexes on his friends and even siccing the Malfoy's old house-elf on him for a while. And why is Harry doing all this? To get Draco to like him? Hardly. Harry wants attention all right, but he wants it from the guy who's been ignoring him and manipulating him by turns, who has implied that he has great expectations for him but won't tell him what's going on, who is in fact is treating him not that much differently than Lucius treats Draco.  

Pippin





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Tue May 26 14:49:05 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 14:49:05 -0000
Subject: Power of names and Tigana SPOILERS WAS : Re: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gvgv1c+nnam@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvgvh1+l8id@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186764

 
> > Pippin:
> > I would do exactly what I would do in the case of a suspected Ponzi artist who wasn't Jewish:  show that he couldn't possibly get the return he was claiming to get with the methods he was claiming he used to get it. I believe that was Dumbledore's objection to Scrimgeour as well. 
> > 
> 
> a_svirn:
> I don't see that. We have no reason to believe that Scrimgeour was anti-Muggle. Nor Voldemort was someone who abused the rules of legitimate business. It's not like exposing a Dark Lord who went bad might have proved detrimental to all those honest and hardworking dark lords who hadn't done anything wrong.

Pippin:
My point was that Dumbledore objected to Scrimgeour's methods and didn't think they could produce the results that Scrimgeour was claiming for them. Exposing a wizard who went bad is fine, and Dumbledore tried to do that. But the argument was that Dumbledore should have made an issue of Riddle's ancestry in order to discredit him. That would have proved detrimental to all those honest and hardworking people with Muggle ancestry who hadn't done anything wrong.

Pippin





From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 14:58:52 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 14:58:52 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20 - The Name of a Mobster
In-Reply-To: <gvbubo+hm8e@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvh03c+5nfa@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186765

---  "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
> > 
> > lizzyben:
> > 
> > But was it ever an irrational superstition?
> 
> Pippin:
> Yes, I think so. Canon makes a point of telling us that Lupin has no idea how the DE's could have found Harry in Tottenham Court Road. He says "Voldemort" in his conversation with Harry at Grimmauld Place. Clearly he doesn't know about the taboo as yet. This seems to be a power that Voldemort didn't have until the Ministry takeover.
> 
> Lizzyben:
> > But it sort of begs the question - if DD knew that "Lord Voldemort" was really just plain old Tom Riddle, why wouldn't he make that fact known? ...
> 
> Pippin:
> 
> Voldemort wasn't trying to scare people out of saying "Tom."  But I think Dumbledore didn't want to make an issue of Riddle's bloodline. There were some people who wouldn't have trusted Voldemort if they'd known he was once Tom Riddle -- but Dumbledore did not think that would be a good reason not to trust someone. 
> 
> Pippin
>

bboyminn:

A couple of points. First, JKR got this idea for 'fear of the
name' from a pair of very real mobsters who were so ruthless
and cruel that people literally feared speaking their name
for fear someone might overhear and take offense.

I think it is the same with Voldemort's name. Nothing happens
directly from speaking the name, it's not bewitched, but if
a non-Death Eater overhears, they might take you for a DE.
And if a DE overhears, they might take offense in that your
are not paying the Dark Lord the proper respect. Either way
you are in danger, so best not to speak the name.

Once that had been established, it became an ingrained habit
among the population. In a sense, it was a somewhat irrational
superstition that bad luck would befall you if you spoke the
name because after the DEs, Voldemort, and the danger were 
gone, people continued the habit and the fear. 

But, in DH, there are very real and dark consequences from 
speaking the name, once it becomes a very real magical Taboo.
It breaks all protective enchantments, and opens a Trace
directly to your location. Which in turn brings the DE or
the Snatchers. Either way, you are in for a heap of misery
as a result.

Real inevitable misery is much more serious than the mere 
possibility of bad luck. 

As I originally said, Harry doesn't fear Voldemort's name,
even as he is wise enough not to speak it.

Now, as to why Dumbledore and others didn't make it known that
Tom Riddle was the boy who eventually became the man called
Lord Voldemort. I don't think Dumbledore or others in the 
Order were hiding the fact. It was there for anyone to find
who was willing to put out even the smallest effort. But I
also think they were not emphasizing the fact, they were not
going around shouting about it. 

If they did, it would weaken and even potentially block 
Dumbledore's investigation into Tom/Voldemort's history.
There was valuable information in Tom's past, and if everyone
was searching for it, it would make it more likely for 
false information to be presented, and make people more likely
to hide very real information.

In short, making this fact widely known, would make Dumbledore's
job harder. The government, in the wizard world and in the real
world, doesn't exactly have a subtle hand in these matters. So,
again, if the knowledge became widely known, and too many
people started to inquire, it would just make Dumbledore's job
that much harder. 

Still, Dumbledore wasn't actively preventing anyone from 
knowing. The information was there for anyone to seek out. But
typical of lazy inept inert governments, as well as people in
general, they don't act unless hit with a fence post, and then
when they do act, they are not subtle about it. 

Just a few thoughts.

Steve/bluewizard





From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 15:27:41 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 15:27:41 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gvgv6k+huef@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvh1pd+b3bk@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186766

> > Betsy Hp:
> > No, because what was written fit the trope so well. I do agree that my personal experience led me in a different direction than JKR was meaning to direct me, but I wasn't completely ignoring the text.  I just interpreted it differently.
> > 
> 
> Pippin:
> It only fits the trope if you ignore the existence of Ron. I think a lot of people would like to do that, because while he works very well as a character in a book, he's not so much fun in a fantasy based on the book. I mean, when we used to play LOTR, nobody wanted to be Sam, and I think Ron has the same problem. Harry's the Chosen One, Hermione's the smartest witch ever, and Ron's just...Ron. He's not, y'know, cool. Shabby clothes, dumpy mom, weirdo dad, same old issues all the time, and when he does save the day, nobody's looking.  
>
> 
> Whereas redeemed characters get all the snide sarcastic lines, and  every knows that if  they  don't die they're bound to become the hero's blood-brother. Edmund is not supposed to be saved from the White Witch and go on being a pill. Except...why couldn't that happen?
> 

Montavilla47:

It's not like you have to chose between Ron and Draco (although, that is exactly what Harry did).  I mean, as a reader it's not like Harry couldn't eventually be friends with both of them.   

And, as far as Ron goes, he's the kind of character I absolutely love in a story.  I love characters who are modest and loyal and care less about being in the spotlight than in supporting their friends.  Of course, JKR makes Ron a bit different in that he wants to be in the spotlight, too, and has to struggle against his envy of his friend's celebrity.

Can't quite imagine Sam doing that in LOTR.  

But when you mention this sort of situation, what sprang to my mind was the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the fashion-conscious, spectacularly attractive Buffy ends up lumped with the "uncool" Xander and Willow, rather than the Queen Bee Cordelia.  

But, by the end of the season, Cordelia and Buffy came to a tentatively friendly relationship.  While she never lost her snark, Cordelia remained part of the gang until they all graduated from school and she moved to L.A. to star on Angel.

As for the other two, Willow eventually grew out of her uncoolness, but Xander almost stubbornly refused to ever become more than average.  That was his greatness.  One of my favorite Xander moments is when he pragmatically comes and fixes Buffy's picture window that was broken by one of her epic vampire battles.





From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 15:27:48 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 15:27:48 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gv7qm5+sgee@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvh1pk+gpuf@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186767

---  "hagrid_hut" <hagrid_hut at ...> wrote:
>
> > Alla:
> <SNIP>
> >> I mean, isn't it sort of a symbolic moment when Dumbledore tells Harry to say Voldemort and gives him that famous line about fear of the name only increasing fear of the person?
> >
> > So I am wondering isn't this moment sort of negates that earlier symbolism?
> >
> > ... <SNIP>
> 
> Hagrid_Hut:
> 
> In regards to your first quote, I don't agree that it ruins the symbolism  of Dumbledore's advice.  If anything, it reminds us that Dumbledore is no longer there to even give Harry advice, ...--the cunningness of the move to track his own name shows that Voldemort is not a person to be trifled with, as Ron suggests.
> 
> I don't think that not saying the name means that Harry is afraid of Voldemort now.  ...
> 
> Also, now there is an actual reason for not saying Voldemorts name, whereas before the practice was based on mass hysteria.  ...
>

bboyminn:

I'm going to reiterate what I have already said. I really don't
think 'Fear of the name increases fear of the thing' is negated
by the later events.

Harry DOESN'T fear Voldemort's name. He doesn't allow the
mystic of the name to increase his fear of Voldemort. But at
the same time, for the most part, he is wise enough not to 
speak the name when it now has very real consequences. 

Harry doesn't fear the name; he fears the very real consequences.

But the statement by Dumbledore still holds true, by not fearing
the name, you do not build a false mystic around a person and
the name. But, as I've already said, it would be foolish in the
extreme to speak the name knowing that very real consequences
are now attached to it.

Dumbledore's statement is as true as ever, but the circumstances
have changed.

Steve/bboyminn





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 16:04:01 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 16:04:01 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20 - The Name of a Mobster
In-Reply-To: <gvh03c+5nfa@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvh3th+jb7g@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186768


Pippin:
> My point was that Dumbledore objected to Scrimgeour's methods and didn't think they could produce the results that Scrimgeour was claiming for them. Exposing a wizard who went bad is fine, and Dumbledore tried to do that. But the argument was that Dumbledore should have made an issue of Riddle's ancestry in order to discredit him. That would have proved detrimental to all those honest and hardworking people with Muggle ancestry who hadn't done anything wrong.

Alla:
I just do not see how. People who are supposed to be the target audience for the story of Tom Riddle's origins are **already** not trusting muggles, half-bloods, you name it.

I just do not see that revealing who Tom Riddle is will make them distrust half-bloods more, just as I do not see how not revealing who Tom Riddle really was will make them distrust half bloods any less.

And I especially do not see how it could backfire on Dumbledore, because it is not like I am suggesting he should have spread out the story which says ? oh half bloods are lower humans and Tom Riddle is one of them. I am suggesting he should have let the **facts** be known, such as that Lord Voldemort is really a half-blood Tom Riddle, and let everybody else form their own conclusions.

People who think that half bloods are the same people as everybody else, would continue to think that way, I would think, now DE who thought that Lordie is the same higher species of humans that they would fancy themselves to be now would think twice whether they would want to follow him, no?

Of course they do not like half-bloods, they ALREADY do not like them, my point is that I do not get why Dumbledore did not make it work for him.

Magpie:
I think Tom Riddle's blood would only be of secondary importance anyway. The
important reason to call him Riddle, as Dumbledore and Harry both do, is to make
him human and cut him down to size rather than referring to him by his scary
goth name he uses to make him sound unbeatable. Not only would it work, it's imo
something that should definitely be given to everyone. That line of Dumbledore's
is very bizarre to me, that his "proper name" isn't You-Know-Who, but Lord
Voldemort. His proper name is Tom Riddle from Little Hangledon.

Alla:

Hm, I am not sure I follow actually. I mean, I am all for making him less unbeatable, but I would place the reason to call him Riddle to show his bloodline as of utmost importance. Are you saying that  name Voldemort also gives him some additional magical powers? I guess I do not quite understand how the name Voldemort makes him less than human? Could you elaborate? I mean, we know of course that he is less than human, but I guess I am not sure what this has to do with calling him by his proper name. Are you saying that this can revert him to who he was before he did all those magical transformations?

But yes, this line is bizarre to me.

Magpie:
If some people who were already obsessed with bloodline happened to also be
turned off by his Muggle parents all the better, but there's more to Tom Riddle
than his blood status. Besides which, it's the truth that Voldemort doesn't want
known so why not share it? The inner circle all knows it.

Alla:

Yes, agreed.


Steve:
<SNIP>
If they did, it would weaken and even potentially block
Dumbledore's investigation into Tom/Voldemort's history.
There was valuable information in Tom's past, and if everyone
was searching for it, it would make it more likely for
false information to be presented, and make people more likely
to hide very real information. <SNIP>

Alla:

How so? You mean it would be more likely for Voldemort present false information? But he knows that Dumbledore is already interested in his past anyway. Or you mean somebody else will want to mislead Dumbledore? Could you elaborate who would want to do so and why it will be harder for Dumbledore to investigate if more people know that Voldemort is Tom.

I can see this reason, if I can understand how it works.

Steve:
<SNIP>
Still, Dumbledore wasn't actively preventing anyone from
knowing. The information was there for anyone to seek out. But
typical of lazy inept inert governments, as well as people in
general, they don't act unless hit with a fence post, and then
when they do act, they are not subtle about it.

Alla:

I did not suggest that Dumbledore was actively preventing everybody from seeking it out. I really do not get though how people were supposed to know that they are to seek out this information . In short to me not preventing everybody from seeking out the information they do not know they should seek is not enough.

JMO,

Alla






From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Tue May 26 16:24:47 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 16:24:47 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20 - The Name of a Mobster
In-Reply-To: <gvh3th+jb7g@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvh54f+nad5@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186769

> Magpie:
> I think Tom Riddle's blood would only be of secondary importance anyway. The
> important reason to call him Riddle, as Dumbledore and Harry both do, is to make
> him human and cut him down to size rather than referring to him by his scary
> goth name he uses to make him sound unbeatable. Not only would it work, it's imo
> something that should definitely be given to everyone. That line of Dumbledore's
> is very bizarre to me, that his "proper name" isn't You-Know-Who, but Lord
> Voldemort. His proper name is Tom Riddle from Little Hangledon.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Hm, I am not sure I follow actually. I mean, I am all for making him less unbeatable, but I would place the reason to call him Riddle to show his bloodline as of utmost importance. Are you saying that  name Voldemort also gives him some additional magical powers? I guess I do not quite understand how the name Voldemort makes him less than human? Could you elaborate? 

Magpie:
It doesn't give him additional magical powers, but it gives him the illusion of them. Most wizards only know him as a name and a legend. "Lord Voldemort" is by design a spooky dark lord name. Nobody knows where he came from or how he became so powerful. He might be the devil himself for all they know (if they have that type of concept). Tom Riddle is a human guy just like everybody else is. He has an ordinary background that's not really scary at all.

That's why Dumbledore and Harry both call him a version of his real name when they face him as equals imo. They're not going to call him what he wants to be called, they're going to call him by who he really is. It bugs him and it cuts him down to size. Any mundane details of the guy's life chips away at the mystery he's intentionally created around himself.

Sometimes it makes me think of something else that isn't quite the same thing, but I believe Churchill always referred to Hitler as "Corporal Hitler," just to stress that he wasn't some military high commander but a guy who'd never been promoted above corporal. He wasn't going to play into the fantasy.

Basically, it's the same reason the Twins' "You-Know-Poo" is a good idea. It's good to in your own mind mock him or refer to the ordinary wizard he's taken such pains to not be anymore.

I don't think, btw, that Dumbledore's investigations would be so hindered by other people knowing about the guy, though. Dumbledore's the guy who found Tom to begin with and knows how to go straight to the source. Voldemort's already got people working overtime to spread false information about him and that doesn't get in Dumbledore's way.
 
-m




From a_svirn at yahoo.com  Tue May 26 21:31:09 2009
From: a_svirn at yahoo.com (a_svirn)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 21:31:09 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20 - The Name of a Mobster
In-Reply-To: <gvh54f+nad5@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvhn2t+gm8o@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186770

> Pippin:
> My point was that Dumbledore objected to Scrimgeour's methods and didn't think they could produce the results that Scrimgeour was claiming for them. Exposing a wizard who went bad is fine, and Dumbledore tried to do that. 

a_svirn:
No, he did not. He sat on the relevant information. 

> Pippin:
But the argument was that Dumbledore should have made an issue of Riddle's ancestry in order to discredit him. That would have proved detrimental to all those honest and hardworking people with Muggle ancestry who hadn't done anything wrong.

a_svirn:
How? Your analogy with anti-Semitic government doesn't work with Scrimgeour, because the Ministry for all its many faults wasn't anti-Muggle. Nor was the public opinion. So it wouldn't be like "See you can't trust those half-bloods, I always say." If Dumbledore had revealed that Lord Voldemort was actually one Tom Riddle, named so after his Muggle father, he would have merely exposed him and those in the inner circle who were privy to this information as hypocrites. What is wrong with that?

 
> > Alla:
> > 
> > Hm, I am not sure I follow actually. I mean, I am all for making him less unbeatable, but I would place the reason to call him Riddle to show his bloodline as of utmost importance. Are you saying that  name Voldemort also gives him some additional magical powers? I guess I do not quite understand how the name Voldemort makes him less than human? Could you elaborate? 
> 
> Magpie:
> It doesn't give him additional magical powers, but it gives him the illusion of them. Most wizards only know him as a name and a legend. "Lord Voldemort" is by design a spooky dark lord name. Nobody knows where he came from or how he became so powerful. He might be the devil himself for all they know (if they have that type of concept). Tom Riddle is a human guy just like everybody else is. He has an ordinary background that's not really scary at all.
> 
> That's why Dumbledore and Harry both call him a version of his real name when they face him as equals imo. They're not going to call him what he wants to be called, they're going to call him by who he really is. It bugs him and it cuts him down to size. Any mundane details of the guy's life chips away at the mystery he's intentionally created around himself.
> 
> Sometimes it makes me think of something else that isn't quite the same thing, but I believe Churchill always referred to Hitler as "Corporal Hitler," just to stress that he wasn't some military high commander but a guy who'd never been promoted above corporal. He wasn't going to play into the fantasy.

a_svirn:
I had a similar association -- how Wellington and the British in general would insist on calling Napoleon *Buonaparte* instead of *Bonaparte* -- a French version of the same name he adopted. Meaning, you can reinvent yourself all you want as a "first council" or an "emperor", but we all know that you are nothing more that a Corsican adventurer, not even a Frenchman. That's also cutting down to size. You know that guy who calls himself Lord Something? He's actually called Tom Riddle, his father's folks were Muggle neighbours of that crazy old Marvolo Gaunt. 




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Wed May 27 00:17:29 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 00:17:29 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20 - The Name of a Mobster
In-Reply-To: <gvhn2t+gm8o@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvi0qp+814d@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186771

 
> 
> a_svirn:
> No, he did not. He sat on the relevant information.

Pippin:
Dumbledore is characterized many times as working tirelessly against Voldemort, warning people that Voldemort is behind the disappearances and unexplained deaths that marked his rise to power. That information is relevant to what sort of leader Voldemort would be. His ancestry is not, IMO.  
 

> > Pippin:
> But the argument was that Dumbledore should have made an issue of Riddle's ancestry in order to discredit him. That would have proved detrimental to all those honest and hardworking people with Muggle ancestry who hadn't done anything wrong.
> 
> a_svirn:
> How? Your analogy with anti-Semitic government doesn't work with Scrimgeour, because the Ministry for all its many faults wasn't anti-Muggle.

Pippin:
But it was! There's plenty of canon for that.

The ministry is inclined to think that people who are pro-Muggle or  have Muggle ancestry lack 'proper wizard feeling', as Molly put it. That was one of the reasons that Tom himself gave for not pursuing a ministry career.

Alla:
I just do not see how. People who are supposed to be the target audience for the story of Tom Riddle's origins are **already** not trusting muggles, half-bloods, you name it.

Pippin:
And how do you propose that Dumbledore confine this information to the "target audience"? Won't it also reach the vast  number of people who respect Dumbledore's opinion? Won't it have far more influence on them than on the pureblood fanatics who are Dumbledore's enemies and don't trust him anyway? 

Is it possible to smear one person as Muggleborn and not another? That's what Snape thought, and boy was he wrong. As Lily said, why should she be any different?  If Voldemort isn't worthy to help lead the WW because he's part Muggle, than neither is Hermione. 

Pippin





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 27 00:38:34 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 00:38:34 -0000
Subject: How important is Hagrid?
In-Reply-To: <gvbqoj+g6c9@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvi22a+9ecl@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186772

Jacob Owen <hagrid_hut@> wrote:

> <snip> Hagrid had a muggle father. Hagrid is the only character I can think of besides Madame Maxine that has his roots in muggles, wizards, and beasts.
> 
zanooda responded:
> 
> I wonder why you would think that Hagrid's father was a Muggle. He was a wizard, and he was called so in the book. I'm not at home at the moment, so I can't give you the exact quote right now, but it was in GoF, "Rita Skeeter's Scoop" chapter, at the very end, where Hagrid shows his dad's picture to the Trio. But even without this quote it always seemed obvious to me that Hagrid's dad was a wizard. Also, I wouldn't qualify giants as "beasts", if that's what you meant :-).
>
Carol adds:

I agree. Muggles who see Giants are generally killed by them since they have no defense against them and know nothing about their ways. At best, they'd have their memory modified if they encountered one. They don't even believe in Giants, and certainly wouldn't marry one.
And I doubt that Hagrid would hold Muggles in such contempt if his much-loved father were one. 

Carol, willing to bet that Madame Maxime's parents were also a Wizard and a Giantess (no Muggles involved and the prospect of a Giant marrying a Witch being too horrible to contemplate)




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Wed May 27 00:44:40 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 00:44:40 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20 - The Name of a Mobster
In-Reply-To: <gvi0qp+814d@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvi2do+2efu@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186773

Alla:
I just do not see how. People who are supposed to be the target audience for the
story of Tom Riddle's origins are **already** not trusting muggles, half-bloods,
you name it.

Pippin:
And how do you propose that Dumbledore confine this information to the "target
audience"? Won't it also reach the vast number of people who respect
Dumbledore's opinion? Won't it have far more influence on them than on the
pureblood fanatics who are Dumbledore's enemies and don't trust him anyway?
<SNIP>

Alla:

I do not propose that Dumbledore confine this information to the target audience at all. Because of course it is hard if not impossible to do. I believe I said that this information should be intended to influence target audience primarily. I absolutely do not see how this would have any influence on Dumbledore's friends who respect him.

As I said upthread I am not suggesting that the story Dumbledore should spread should sound like this ? OMG Voldemort is really half blood Tom Riddle and thus he is unworthy to rule you ? dear Lucius and Co, you know?

No, what I am saying is that Dumbledore should have spread out **facts** and facts only. The fact being that Voldemort is half blood Tom Riddle. Are you saying that this fact is a defamation of the half bloods in itself? Could you please elaborate how is it so?

And I am saying that Dumbledore should have let people reach their own conclusions. And what I am also saying is that the conclusion which his target audience is highly likely to reach would work perfectly for Dumbledore and everybody else would not care at all, if the story says that Voldemort is really half blood Tom and that is pretty much it.

What I am saying is that people who are not prejudiced against half bloods would remain to be so when they find out that one of the half bloods is a leader of torturers and murderers. I am pretty sure that they would shrug and say ? who cares. In every race, or nation, or whatever, there are good people and bad people. One half blood is the leader of the very bad people (most of whom are purebloods) and one half blood teenager is doing his best to freed the world from him and he also has a Muggleborn friend who helps him and pureblood friend, etc, etc

I am sure you know that there were plenty of Jews who were the leaders of Bolshevik party during the Russian revolution. I have not met a person who **started** to hate Jews because they were among the leaders of Bolshevik party and who brought the Communist regime on Russia and other republics. But of course there are people who **already** hated Jews and happy to bring this reason as **one of many** as to why Jews are not be trusted, you know?

Pippin:
Is it possible to smear one person as Muggleborn and not another? That's what
Snape thought, and boy was he wrong. As Lily said, why should she be any
different? If Voldemort isn't worthy to help lead the WW because he's part
Muggle, than neither is Hermione.

Alla:

Of course! I however suggest that Dumbledore does no such thing ? no smearing of anybody, just facts. Are you saying that it will be better to **hide** the fact that Hermione is Muggleborn? Not during the war, during peace time. If it is, I think WW should go to hell, frankly.
Magpie:
It doesn't give him additional magical powers, but it gives him the illusion of
them. <SNIP>

Alla:

Magpie, just wanted to say your explanation was perfect and works very well for me. Thank you!






From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 27 00:49:00 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 00:49:00 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvbvd6+ke0n@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvi2ls+a8db@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186774

Pippin wrote:
> Whoa. Calling Harry a good flier is like calling Mozart a good musician. Harry is truly exceptional, capable enough as an absolute novice  to make a catch that Charlie Weasley, who could have played professionally,  couldn't have made. Harry gets to be the youngest House player in about a century, so the rule has been bent before, probably for the same reason, a truly rare talent.   Would you deny Mozart his own musical instrument and the opportunity to play in competition?

Carol responds:
It would be no hardship for Harry to wait till second year like everyone else. He'd have his chance to fly in Madame Hooch's class and probably be her star pupil. Instead, McGonagall undermines the discipline in Madame Hooch's class by rewarding Harry for disobeying the teacher who just said she'd expel any student who flew while she was gone. (Draco also gets away with flying, but, of course, he's the bad kid so his "cheek" isn't rewarded.)

McGonagall isn't "bending" (breaking) the rules for Harry's benefit. She's doing it because, as she says herself, she's tired of seeing the Quidditch Cup in Severus Snape's office.

As for "Charlie Weasley couldn't have done it," I think we can take that comment with a grain of salt since Charlie could have played professionally. Or maybe she meant that he couldn't have done it in his first year.

Carol, who thinks that McGonagall (like Snape) could use a few lessons in fairness and sportsmanship





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 27 01:48:57 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 01:48:57 -0000
Subject: Cats/Sword/
In-Reply-To: <gvcdhr+6a0a@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvi669+e4lc@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186775

-> Carol earlier:
> 
> << -it's not going to provide Harry with any sort of love protection (impossible, anyway, because they don't share the same blood) >>

Catlady responded: 
> I don't recall that the 'love protection' had anything to do with shared blood -- isn't there an argument that Harry's temporary death put love protection on all the Hogwarts defenders? Where the blood comes in is that DD cast a spell that Lily's love protection on Harry would last as long as he lived with her 'blood' (meaning Petunia and Dudley, not a precious sealed test tube drawn for a Muggle blood test but never used). <snip>

Carol again:

Remember the infamous gleam in Dumbledore's eye? He knew that LV's taking Harry's blood would (or at least might!) keep Harry from dying rather than, as LV hoped and intended, extend the love protection to him. (I'm aware that DD used Lily's love protection to protect Harry at the Dursleys, but that's a separate matter from what happened after Voldemort used Harry's blood to help himself create a new body. "Blood" at that point becomes literal as well as figurative.)

Yes, Harry's self-sacrifice protects the Hogwarts defenders as his mother's self-sacrifice protected him, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about what kept him from dying when the Horcrux was destroyed. If it hadn't been for the shared drop of blood, he would have "gone on" with no chance of returning.

Here's the canon to show that the shared blood did indeed save Harry's life the first time. Dumbledore is talking to Harry in King's Cross about Voldemort's failure to understand the power of love and innocence:

"He took your blood believing it would strengthen him. He took into his body a tiny part of the enchantment your mother laid upon you when she died for you. His body keeps her sacrifice alive, and while that enchantment survives, so do you and so does Voldemort's last hope for himself" (DH Am. ed. 710).

Later, DD says, "Without meaning to, as you now know, Lord Voldemort doubled the bond between you when he returned to a human form. A part of his soul was still attached to yours, and, thinking to strengthen himself, he took a part of your mother's sacrifice into himself. If he could only have understood the precise and terrible power of that sacrifice, he would not, perhaps, have dared to touch your blood" (710-11).

Exactly what all this means is, of course, subject to interpretation, but I think it follows logically from the gleam in DD's eye. It's the drop of blood, which links Harry to LV and therefore to LV's remaining Horcrux, that prevents Harry from dying when he's hit by the AK. Instead, he goes to "King's Cross" with the option of "going on" or returning.

Voldemort, of course, has not actually been hit by an AK when DD speaks to Harry, and yet his soul, too, ends up in King's Cross in the form of the flayed child. Like Harry, he is not dead but unconscious. It appears that the blood link to Harry, not the no-longer-operative scar link, causes Voldemort to fall unconscious. The soul bit, we know, is utterly destroyed, and the scar link ceases to exist the moment the AK strikes. With the scar link gone, the only link that could cause him to fall unconscious along with Harry is the shared drop of blood. The double bond that DD speaks of in a part of the quotation that I snipped is now reduced to a single bond created whn LV took Harry's blood into himself.

To return to Dumbledore's words, "while that enchantment survives, so do you" must mean that once Voldemort has taken that drop of blood from Harry, Harry can't die (at least not by Voldemort's hand) because "Voldemort's body keeps [Lily's[ sacrifice alive." His immortality extends to Harry, at least in terms of "neither can live while the other survives." Once Voldemort's last Horcrux, Nagini, is destroyed, he becomes mortal--and so does Harry. The blood protection can no longer give him the protection of Voldemort's Horcruxes since the Horcruxes no longer exist. If Harry is hit by an AK this time, he's dead.

As for "Voldemort's last hope for himself," I take that to mean not the Horcruxes, which are the antithesis of Lily's love protection and not a true hope at all, but the chance for repentance, the chance to feel remorse that he could not otherwise have felt because he has that bit of "love" within himself. Otherwise, he'll spend eternity under that bench, beyond any possible help.

I could be mistaken, of course, but IMO the whole point of the graveyard scene is to double the link between Harry and Voldemort and give Harry a chance to survive his own self-sacrifice--as Dumbledore knew from the moment he heard about it. (The second encounter, of course, doesn't depend on love since the love protection that Harry's intended self-sacrifice has given to others doesn't extend to him and the shared drop of blood has ceased to operate. It depends on the Elder Wand.)

Carol, not at all sure that she's presented her view of the matter clearly




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 27 02:32:03 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 02:32:03 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <85CD4D9323EA438BAEDD685DBB4CE883@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gvi8n3+o093@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186776

Shaun wrote:
> <snip>
> I certainly agree that Professor McGonagall wants Harry on the team for reasons that aren't entirely about Harry (and are probably more about Gryffindor prestige than anything else) but the thing is, that wouldn't be an issue if Harry wasn't very good.

Carol responds:
There's no evidence that it's "about Harry" at all (unless it's about the fact that he's the famous Harry Potter and McG hopes that DD will grant her request for that reason). It's about winning the Quidditch Cup. McG says so herself.

Shaun:
> Hogwarts should be training Harry for any potential career. It should be training any of students with any special potentials in any areas in this way. That's both a duty of a school, and, once again, entirely consistent with real world practice.

Carol responds:
Hogwarts should give Harry the same opportunities for professional training that it gives any other student. Do students with a talent for Transfiguration or Potions get special help at Hogwarts? Not unless you count the Slug Club. And Harry would have six years to play Quidditch. Given that he's a natural, it makes no difference. He wins games from the moment he first sits on a broom. He doesn't need teachers bending the rules for him and buying him the best broom available at the time. (As for real-world practice, I seem to recall the old USSR giving young athletes special training at the expense of their regular education. I don't see schools in the Free World giving special privileges to eleven-year-old prodigies.)

Shaun:
> 
> Viktor Krum is about three years older than Harry, not the same age.

Carol responds:

I think Magpie is comparing Viktor Krum in GoF with Harry in HBP--not quite the same age, but close. And Viktor is clearly the greater prodigy.

Shaun:
>snip>
> I think it's hard to compare the two although, yes, I think Viktor is probably the better of the two. Even out of two brilliant players, one may still be more brilliant - but I'm prepared to guess Viktor has had some support to get to the level he does as well. <snip>

Carol responds:
Given the favoritism that Karkaroff shows Krum (who, it seems, doesn't even use his time in the library to study) I have no doubt that Karkaroff gave him special privileges from the first moment he saw him fly, and if Durmstrang had a no-brooms-for-first-years rule, he would have broken it just as McGonagall did in similar circumstances. But we condemn Karkaroff because he's Karkaroff, a former DE who snitched on other DEs to save his own skin, not to mention that he'll use any means to help Krum win the TWT. It's wrong for *him* to favor Krum (or Snape to favor Draco rather less drastically). It's wrong for him to call Poliokoff a "disgusting boy." 

I see very little difference (except in degree) between McGonagall's favoritism of Harry in first year and Karkaroff's of Krum in GoF. Both are providing a protege with special privileges so that he will win a tournament, one for a House and one for a school. I see very little difference between calling Poliokoff a "disgusting boy" and referring to a student (as yet unknown but still with feelings) as "abysmally foolish" or telling him not to let anyone from Durmstrang know that he can't cast a simple Switching Spell.

Favoritism is favoritism and psychological abuse is psychological abuse whether the teacher involved is McGonagall, Snape, Karkaroff, Slughorn, or Dumbledore.

I don't care in the least about the Parvati incident. It's just McGonagall being uptight about the appearance of her students in front of visiting schools. Parvati seems to have understood that, though I'll bet she had some resentful thoughts about being insulted in front of her fellow Gryffindors whether or not she was violating a school rule. But I do think that it's wrong to excuse favoritism or teachers "bending" rules so that they're team can win. IMO, it's wrong when Karkaroff does it. It's wrong when Fake! Moody does it. It's wrong when Snape does it. And it's wrong when McGonagall does it.

Carol, glad that McG doesn't "bend" the rules when it's time to give Harry detention in SS/PS




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 27 03:51:41 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 03:51:41 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gvh1pk+gpuf@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvidcd+6jm6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186777

bboyminn wrote:
>> <snip>
> Harry doesn't fear the name; he fears the very real consequences.
> <snip>
>But, as I've already said, it would be foolish in the extreme to speak the name knowing that very real consequences are now attached to it.
> 
> Dumbledore's statement is as true as ever, but the circumstances have changed.

Carol responds:

I agree that the circumstances have changed and that it's no longer a superstition but a foolish (not to say dangerous) act with very real consequences. Harry knows these consequences because Ron has explained to him why they were almost caught by DEs in Tottenham Court Road.

And yet, despite Ron's protests, Harry quite deliberately says Voldemort's name as if it were still superstitious nonsense not to do so.

"Come on, Hermione. Why are you so determined not to admit it? Vol--"

"HARRY, NO!"

"--demort's after the Elder Wand!"

"The name's Taboo!" Ron bellowed, leaping to his feet as a loud crack sounded outside the tent. "I told you, Harry, I told you, we can't say it anymore--we've got to put the protection back around us quickly--it's how they find--" (DH Am. ed. 444-45).

But it's too late. Despite Ron's warnings and his attempt to stop Harry, he says the name, anyway, and brings near-disaster on them all. Only his incredible luck and the loyalty of Dobby saves them. Naturally, good comes out of evil and actions have unanticipated consequences--Bellatrix gives away the location of the cup Horcrux and sets the last act of the play in motion.

But, still, Harry knew better. He not only didn't fear the name, even in changed circumstances; he evidently didn't fear the consequences. He still thinks of Ron as superstitiously wanting him to say You Know Who, and he pays the price. Or, rather, Hermione, who is tortured, and, ultimately, Dobby, who is murdered, pay the price.

Too bad Harry didn't think to just call him Riddle.

Carol, wondering why Voldemort didn't figure out how easy it would be to track the Order members by making the name Taboo during VW1




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Wed May 27 04:12:04 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 04:12:04 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvi8n3+o093@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvieik+dch6@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186778


> 
> Carol responds:
> Hogwarts should give Harry the same opportunities for professional training that it gives any other student. Do students with a talent for Transfiguration or Potions get special help at Hogwarts? 

Pippin:
Hermione got a Time Turner. So yes, other students with extraordinary abilities do get special help. I believe it's common for schools in the free world  to give scholarships  and allow independent study to accommodate  practice sessions for athletically or artistically gifted prodigies. 

In any case, only a privileged few are ever going to play House Quidditch at all, so whatever the purpose of the first year rule, it hardly seems necessary to keep ickle firsties from dominating the teams (as if they could.) More likely, it's to keep the vain and the foolhardy from unsupervised flying  until they've been taught to land safely. 

Where do you get the idea that naturals don't benefit from additional training?  

As far as the infamous hair clip, I am sure that other Gryffindor girls would have liked to flirt and draw some attention from the newcomers, but they seem to have respected the decorum of the occasion (or McGonagall's wrath). If so, why would it be fair to let Parvati get away with it?

Pippin





From foxmoth at qnet.com  Wed May 27 04:31:53 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 04:31:53 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20 - The Name of a Mobster
In-Reply-To: <gvi2do+2efu@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvifnp+74vd@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186779

 
> Alla:
> 
> No, what I am saying is that Dumbledore should have spread out **facts** and facts only. The fact being that Voldemort is half blood Tom Riddle. Are you saying that this fact is a defamation of the half bloods in itself? Could you please elaborate how is it so?

Pippin:
So, um, people  against Obama in the recent US presidential election who spread out **facts**  about Obama's Muslim background were just putting the facts out there and letting people reach their own conclusions? And not contributing to any anti-Muslim feeling at all? 

See, Dumbledore does not have the status of a neutral observer who is just reporting facts. He is a known and dedicated opponent of Voldemort, so everything he says about Voldemort has negative spin, just because it's him saying it. I wish people were more objective than that. But they're not, IMO.

Pippin







From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 27 04:42:34 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 04:42:34 -0000
Subject: Why didn't DD reveal Voldemort's identity? (Was: Power of names)
In-Reply-To: <gvfhvg+h2d2@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvigbq+59ul@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186780

Alla wrote:
Alla wrote:
> <snip>
>I do wonder why exactly Dumbledore did not scream at the top of his lungs the truth of who Tom Riddle really was. I am wondering if Dumbledore was so deep into his secrets that he thought that this will be something the world better not know, just as when he did not share his suspicions about Tom with anybody while he was still in school.
> <snip>

Carol responds:

I think you must be right that Dumbledore thought that this information was something that the WW would be better off not knowing or he would have publicized it. The only reason I can think of is one that others have already mentioned, that it would interfere with his investigations.

He could quite easily have revealed that Voldemort was really Tom Riddle, the Slytherin student who had won the award for services to the school for supposedly capturing the monster that had killed Moaning Myrtle. That in itself would provide no hint to Voldemort that DD was investigating his past. After all, DD had visited him at the orphanage and he had applied for a job as DADA teacher. Of course, DD knew who he was. That alone would not have tipped LV off that DD was investigating his past. OTOH, it would not have helped much. Few people would have believed it. Tom Riddle, that charming boy, Prefect and Head Boy, Lord Voldemort? Impossible. No, that handsome and intelligent boy must have died young or he'd have risen to fame in the Ministry. So though it would have been easy and probably harmless to reveal that much information, it was also pointless (IMO).

But revealing that Voldemort was the Half-Blood son of a Witch mother named Merope Gaunt and a Muggle father named Tom Riddle Sr., if he could prove it, would definitely reveal to LV that Dumbledore was investigating his past and might suggest that he was investigating LV's activities as well. And DD did not want Voldemort to suspect that he was interrogating people and obtaining memories, much less that through his investigations, he had learned about the Horcruxes and (by HBP) figured out what some of them probably were.

As for the point others have mentioned, that knowing Riddle was a Half-Blood would deter potential followers from joining him or alienate those who had already done so, I don't think it would have. His earliest schoolboy followers must have simply assumed that he was a Pure-Blood, but what really mattered to them, what made them idolize and follow him, was his Slytherin ancestry. He could speak Parseltongue, and he had (I'm sure they knew) opened the Chamber of Secrets. His later followers must have been intrigued for similar reasons--he was powerful, he was the greatest Legilimens the world had ever known, he was a Parselmouth, and he was descended from Slytherin. He was also the biggest bully on the block, Grindelwald having been defeated and imprisoned just as he was graduating from Hogwarts.

Diehard fanatics like Bellatrix would call Dumbledore a liar if he made that announcement about LV's parentage. Lucius Malfoy and other Pure-Blood supremacists would ignore the information because they had their own anti-Muggle/anti-Muggleborn agenda and being Voldemort's followers allowed them to act on it, giving them power by association. Still other DEs were Half-Bloods themselves, so his parentage wouldn't matter. 

I don't think that Pippin's argument about encouraging prejudice against Muggle-borns by betraying Voldemort's half-Muggle origins had anything to do with Dumbledore's reasons for not revealing Voldemort's identity and background. I think he must have thought that, at best, it would be futile to expose LV's hypocrisy (his hatred of Muggles and Muggle-borns was, in any case, quite real), and, at worst, it would cause Voldemort to suspect that Dumbledore knew too much about him.

And, of course, there's Dumbledore's penchant for secrecy. Best not to let anyone, whether it's Snape or Harry or McGonagall or Scrimgeour, know what he's doing for fear that it would get back to Voldemort.

Anyway, I think that Alla is on the right track here.

Carol, just speculating but unable to think of any other explanation that makes sense






From drednort at alphalink.com.au  Wed May 27 06:17:04 2009
From: drednort at alphalink.com.au (Shaun Hately)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 16:17:04 +1000
Subject: [HPforGrownups] Re: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvieik+dch6@eGroups.com>
References: <gvieik+dch6@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <C507CEA6D07940C5B40671E9C7E5790E@ShaunPC>

No: HPFGUIDX 186781

a_svirn:
> So would I. No one said anything about Harry's being better off
> without Quidditch. We were discussing McGonagall's less than
> sterling record where rule enforcement is concerned.

Shaun:

That may well be what you are discussing. It's not quite what I'm 
discussing, although it's not that far off either.

My point is more looking at whether or not Professor McGonagall is a fair 
and just teacher. That's not quite the same thing as whether or not she 
perfectly adheres to the rules at all times. It is very hard, if not 
impossible, to write school rules that apply equitably in 100% of cases. 
You're doing very well if you can come up with rules that meet that criteria 
in even 99% of cases. To be fair, there needs to be some degree of 
flexibility.

An important factor in my view in deciding whether or not to bend a rule 
(and, sometimes, even if necessary to break it) is whether or not doing so 
is in the best interests of the child.

Professor McGonagall's decision in this case is in Harry's best interest. I 
don't think that's the first thing she thought of but it is an important 
point in deciding whether or not what she did is fair and acceptable. If it 
wasn't in Harry's best interest, it could not be defended - or at least I 
wouldn't do it.

> a_svirn:
> It does have *some* similar characteristics. And some other 
> characteristics
> that British schools don't have. However, "possibility", and even 
> "likelihood"
> is a waaay too long way from "proof".

Shaun:

Please list the significant characteristics, not specifically connected to 
Hogwarts being a 'magical' school, that you believe it doesn't share with 
British schools.

It's not just that Hogwarts shares *some* characteristics with Muggle 
schools in Britain. It shares *most* characteristics with Muggle schools in 
Britain, except in cases where it's magical nature forces there to be an 
exception.

JKR deliberately chose the British boarding school model for Hogwarts for a 
reason - she's said so in interviews. She chose that model (which personally 
she dislikes) because it had the characteristics she needed to make her 
story work. This is why Hogwarts fits the model so well - it's a deliberate 
choice on the author's part. She didn't choose to create Hogwarts are a 
completely unique school. She took a model that she knew would work for her 
story and then changed the bits she needed to change.

Now, as I've said, the hair issues I am talking about here are not confined 
to boarding schools. They are a common feature of British schools in 
general. Recognisable and understandable by her intended audience. People 
who are arguing for Professor McGonagall's actions in the case of Parvarti's 
hairclip not being a matter of a teacher enforcing a school rule, are, in my 
view, asking us to accept that JKR would have written that passage into the 
book, somehow assuming that without any prompting of any sort, that the 
intended audience of the book would assume something that is exactly the 
opposite of their common experience. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense 
to me. I can understand why somebody coming from a different type of 
background who isn't aware of this being a common characteristic of British 
schools, and especially if they feel such a characteristic doesn't make a 
whole lot of sense, interpreting it differently, but I don't think that 
interpretation stands up particularly well - any more than speculation from 
years past that JKR had obviously 'created' the word 'prefect' and chosen it 
because it was so close to 'perfect'.

a_svirn:
> I am sure any child would appreciate the distinction.

Shaun:

I did. So did all my friends. So do my students. Even kids as young as six 
or seven understand the difference between talking about a person and 
talking about a behaviour - it's taught to them in anti-bullying programs 
("You're not allowed to say you don't like David, you are allowed to say you 
don't like David's swearing.")

a_svirn:
> Huh. It wasn't an "assertion" of anything, Shaun. It amazes me that you
> could possibly take a phrase like "what is it, North Korea?" as a
> definitive statement about all boarding schools in the Free World.


Shaun:

That wasn't the whole phrase.

"Approved sort of hair clasp?! What is it, North Korea? I don't believe even 
Umbridge could be bothered to regulate hair clasps."

To me, the whole phrase does look pretty definitive. You've also suggested 
that only the worst type of teacher we've seen (that's my opinion, anyway)is 
the only type who'd do it. Nowhere near true.

But if you didn't mean it to be that definitive, I'll take your word for 
it - you're in a better position to know what you meant than me. Obviously I 
misinterpreted you on that point. I apologise.

a_svirn:
> Talk about generalisations. I accept that most British
> schools have uniforms, some of them regulate hairstyles,
> and sometimes those regulations include things like hairpins
> or hairclasps. How widespread are those hairclip regulations
> is another matter. I doubt there is a survey on hairpins as
> part of uniforms, but I'd be willing to bet that if we were
> to go to edubase or some other public database and sample randomly
> say, ten schools out of every county there wouldn't be many
> schools out there with strict hairpins regulations.

Shaun:

I'd actually be surprised if it hasn't been studied, speaking as somebody 
who does do educational research on occasion. School uniform regulations 
come in for quite a lot of statistical analysis. But I'm not immediately 
aware of any studies. My guess, though, is if a survey of the type you 
described was undertaken, you'd probably find at least fifty percent of 
British schools with some degree of regulation on what female students can 
put in their hair.

a_svirn:
> My reference to North Korea that you chose to interpret
> literally was about Hogwarts in general and its dress-code
> in particular not being as totalitarian as you seem to suggest.
> As for real life British boarding schools, it is a well known
> fact that people who attended them sometimes compared them
> with totalitarian states. Take George Orwell, for instance.
> Or Esmond Rommilly. Hogwarts, however, does not seem nearly
> as bad as Orwell's St. Cyprian's, or Rommilly's Wellington.


Shaun:

True - but even if some characteristics of some boarding schools have been 
described as totalitarian (and with justification in my view, at times), the 
characteristic I've been talking about here is not one that is only 
regulated in totalitarian schools, nor for that matter only in boarding 
schools.

a_svirn:
> I do not "assume" that "the rule could not exist", I simply
> state that there is no evidence of its existence in the books.
> There is, on the other hand an ample body of evidence that
> Hogwarts students indulge in all kinds of hairstyles that
> would not pass the muster of some of the real life British
> schools.

Shaun:

As I have said a number of times now, despite having gone through the books 
with a fine tooth comb looking at every single reference to hair contained 
within them, I haven't seen a single example of a hairstyle that is not one 
that I would expect to be permitted in most real life British schools with 
the *possible* exception of dreadlocks. You keep claiming there is evidence 
of this in the books - once again, I'd ask you to quote this evidence.


a_svirn:
> Moreover, we have in fact the evidence that Hogwarts uniform
> requirements do not include hair regulations. In the letter
> Harry receives in his first year (and that's a general sort
> of letter that every student receives regardless of gender,
> presumably) the uniform requirements outlined as follows:

Shaun:

I'm aware of the list. I'm also aware of similar lists that exist for real 
world schools, and such lists do not normally contain a list of all the 
schools rules relating to uniform and appearance. I have seen exceptions to 
that, but in general, I would not expect to find such information contained 
in a list of what students to buy in regards to uniform, and so the fact 
that Hogwarts list doesn't do that, doesn't in any way suggest that such 
rules don't exist.

The uniform list for my old school can be seen at:

http://tinyurl.com/p4ukj2

Nowhere in that list is there a list of rules concerning appearance - 
because that's not something that needs to be sent home with a list of 
things you need to buy for school, which is what the list Hogwarts sends is.

> a_svirn:
> It's dealing with confidence issues to which McGonagall is referring here.

Shaun:

Yes, it is, I would hope - but the issue with the passwords is a memory 
issue.

a_svirn:
> I don't see how you can convincingly claim that memorising lots of spells,
> most of them in another language even, does not involve auditory memory.
> Not that Neville's memory problems are exclusively auditory.

Shaun:

Neville's memory problems do seem to me to be almost exclusively if not 
exclusively auditory memory problems. I don't see signs of him having a poor 
visual or kinaesthetic memory.

But you are quite correct - memorising the names of spells is something that 
heavily involves auditory memory.

The thing is though, Professor McGonagall's classes don't seem involve 
memorising a lot of spells. I don't believe we ever learn the name of a 
spell in a Transfiguration class. When Moody/Crouch transfgures Draco into a 
ferret, he doesn't say a spell - nor does Professor McGonagall say one when 
she turns him back. Not all magic seems to require the use of spells with 
complicated names. Transfiguration is a lot more about theory. Professor 
McGonagall gets the students to copy down large amounts of notes in her 
classes - that for most kids with auditory memory issues is a strategy that 
works for them because it engages visual and kinaesthetic memory. Snapes' 
classes on the other hand involve following complicated lists of 
instructions he gives them where order is critical - a disaster for a child 
with auditory processing issues.

a_svirn:
> Well, Mrs. Longbottom had informed McGonagall of her concerns. She
> said presumably that it is not *safe* to trust Neville's memory,
> otherwise she would have given him the form as other parents or
> guardians did. McGonagall chose to ignore it, and ended up
> compromising her students' safety.

Shaun:

If I, as a teacher, am given a form by a parent and the parent says they are 
giving it to me because they don't trust the child to do it, I wouldn't 
immediately think of memory issues. I'd think of issues of carelessness, 
which are quite different.

a_svirn:
> Your example does not illustrate the argument, because your being behind
> in your marking has nothing to do with that student's not doing his or her
> homework. Whereas McGonagall's arrangement had a very direct impact on
> the Neville's password fiasco.

Shaun:

It's your argument that McGonagall is hypocritical in punishing Neville. 
That's the argument I'm addressing.

a_svirn:
> And I am arguing that it is exactly the situation, because
> Neville *was* substantially disadvantaged by Sir Cadogan's passwords.

Shaun:

He was not substantially disadvantaged in the classroom which is what the 
law you are talking about refers to.

a_svirn:
> Barely. And Neville is constantly shown in the books as a
> walking disaster. If  his problems weren't obvious to her, it
> is because she chose to interpret them as laziness or
> carelessness. Which is not very well done of her.

Shaun:

Show us a situation where Neville displays his characteristics as a 'walking 
disaster' in front of Professor McGonagall. I can't recall any but I haven't 
looked for these but they may exist. A teacher can only be held responsible 
for knowing about problems they saw or they were told about. If there is 
evidence that Professor McGonagall saw Neville's problems, then fine - I 
can't think of any, but such could exist.

> a_svirn:
> But your offered justification for bending the rule in question
> was that Harry was safe.


Shaun:

Not, it wasn't.

I am saying that that is probably the rationale behind the rule (in my 
opinion) and therefore it that rationale does not hold, there's no reason 
not to bend the rule. It's not the justification for bending it - that's 
quite different. It's clear that that is so he can play Quidditch for the 
good of Gryffindor. But you shouldn't bend a rule unless you can get around 
it's rationale.

>> Shaun:
>>
>> We're not talking about a criminal case when it comes to Parvarti, 
>> though.
>> We're talking about a case of school discipline - which does not require 
>> a
>> presumption of innocence in law.
>
> a_svirn:
> You were the one who brought it.

Shaun:

Yes - because in the case of the accusations against Professor McGonagall, 
they are serious enough that I believe that's the acceptable standard. The 
accusation against Parvarti is not that serious.

It's much more serious to accuse a teacher of acting outside their authority 
than to accuse a student of breaking a rule about a hairpin.

> a_svirn:
> What allegations? That she is being petty? I don't think it is a matter 
> for lawyers either.

Shaun:

No, not that she is being petty. But that she is acting outside of her 
authority. It's not petty to enforce a school rule in a situation where it 
would normally be enforced. So if you think it's petty, it suggests to me 
you believe she is acting outside that type of authority - and yes, that is 
a serious accusation.

Magpie:
> This isn't about children not understanding that sometimes
> rules should be bent in order to make things fair. This is
> about this particular situation *not* being a case of rules
> "bent" to make anything fair and any kid could see that.
> The kids have to deal with that since they have no say in
> the situation, but I don't think they'd also agree to call
> it that as well.

Shaun:

I don't see why not.

What is it about this situation that is inherently unfair? An exceptionally 
good flyer is being given a chance to play Quidditch.

If we had a case where another first-year student had shown equal potential 
and had been denied that chance, then, yes, the kids would undoubtedly find 
it unfair.

But we've no reason to suppose that's not the case.

Magpie:
> Substitute situations that are about being fair or general
> ideas like "zero tolerance" are not relevant. Harry's being
> given a broom by the school has nothing to do with a zero
> tolerance policy on anything. I'm not sure why you listed
> all these examples of school policies being enforced in a
> ridiculous way (girl suspended for having a nail file) as
> if their being unfair makes Harry's situation fair.


Shaun:

The reason I mentioned them is quite simple. Because they illustrate what 
happens in schools if we decide that being fair means treating every case as 
if it's exactly the same without considering individual differences in those 
cases. It doesn't lead to things being fairer. It leads to profound 
unfairness. You get fairness when there is flexibility in how rules are 
enforced.

I can see how somebody could reasonably argue that this particular case is 
not one that leads to a fair result. I don't agree, but I can see why - 
there's always room in particular cases for disagreement on where the line 
between fair and unfair lies. My point is though that being flexible is not 
always a bad thing. Being inflexible is.

Magpie:
> This
> situation is more like if the school has a zero tolerance
> on bringing weapons to school, but when Harry gets caught
> shooting at cans and it turns out he's a good shot his
> teacher buys him a top of the line gun for himself hoping
> he'll take out somebody she doesn't like. Because that's
> only fair?

Shaun:

Personally, I'd have punished Harry for (and Draco too) for flying without 
permission. But that decision really should be in the hands of Madam Hooch, 
not Professor McGonagall in my view. If there's any unfairness in this case 
that I can see, it's in that both of them escaped punishment. But I'd still 
have given Harry the chance to play Quidditch.

Magpie:
> There are no other cases that we know of that are identical to Harry's
> since Harry's special treament is referred to a lot. Lots of kids have
> the potential to play internationally someday. According to JKR Ginny
> Weasley does play professionally and the rule isn't waived for her.
> Nor is Harry's alleged professional potential ever shown to be a
> motivation for anybody.

Shaun:

Harry doesn't just have potential. He shows it. That means the school is 
aware of it. You can't blame a teacher for not nurturing unusual potential 
they don't know about. But if they become aware of it, things change.

Magpie:
> Yeah, I noticed Harry never loses anything, really, as long
> as he's conscious. But canonically, McGonagall doesn't really
> care one way or the other how Harry nurtures his brilliant
> talent. She just wants a Seeker for Gryffindor--and she wants
> him playing on the best broom. Once she gets that, whether
> Harry reaches his full potential as a professional player
> is no concern of hers.

Shaun:

Isn't it? It's Professor McGonagall's job to give Harry career advice in 
fifth year. He doesn't tell her he wasnts to be a professional Quidditch 
player. He tells her he wants to be an Auror. So she tells him what he needs 
to do. In fact:

"'Potter,' she said in ringing tones, 'I will assist you to become an Auror 
if it's the last thing I do! If I have to coach you nightly I will make sure 
you receive the required results!'"

Now, admittedly, a lot of that is just her taking umbrage at Umbridge. But 
the fact remains, when Harry discusses his future plans, she advises him on 
the ones he tells her about. I assume she'd do that whatever he had come up 
with.

Magpie:
> McGonagall does not let Harry break the rule because he's so good his
> talent must be nurtured and she doesn't buy him a top of the line broom
> because she's acting as his parent. She lets him play and buys him the
> broom so that her team can have a Seeker riding on the best broom.
> This is the reason given in canon. There is no evidence of McGonagall
> or anyone else at the school feeling a personal responsibility to
> nurture Harry's personal gifts as a flier. Nor is there any examples
> of McGonagall acting as a parent in this kind of elaborately generous way.
> Or really any way. She's not acting as a parent here, she's acting as
> the house mistress and so "owner" of the Gryffindor team. Thank
> goodness she isn't claiming to be acting on a sacred trust to look
> after Harry as a war orphan by buying him the broom and letting him
> play--the blatant benefits to herself and notable lack of motherly
> feelings elsewhere would suggest some cynicism.

Shaun:

A teacher in a position of being in loco parentis is *always* acting as a 
parent. That's what the term means.

And you're assuming that Professor McGonagall doesn't have these 
motivations. As a teacher, I'd assume she does. She knew and taught his 
parents. She was there watching over the place he was going to be taken, the 
day his parents died - years before she ever became his teacher or his Head 
of House. Professor McGonagall is not a demonstrative mother-type figure 
like Molly Weasley - but, yeah, I think she does feel a particular 
responsibility for Harry.

Mapie:
> So since legitimate scholarship programs exist a teacher
> getting the "no first years may have their own brooms at
> school" and buying him a top of the line model must be
> totally like a scholarship program? I don't think so.
> Any example of favoritism, bias, prejudice or unequal
> dealings with students could be justified that way.

Shaun:

I didn't claim that these things were "Totally like a scholarship program." 
I just pointed out that doing something that is good for the school, or good 
for the house, can also be intended to be good for the child.

And, yes, a lot of favouritism, bias, prejudice, or unequal dealings with 
students could be justified in the way I'm describing. It doesn't mean that 
that is what's behind them.

As for buying Harry a broom, I recently bought one my students a laptop 
computer. As it happens, he's not one of my favourite students. Not even 
close. What he is is a student who can benefit from having a computer in a 
way none of my other students could and who had nobody else who'd ever be 
willing to buy him one. I've also bought a pair of glasses for a student in 
the last year or so.

Magpie:
> No, he isn't. The fact the professional players come from
> Hogwarts does not mean they are being trained to be
> professionals at Hogwarts. They're not being trained at
> all. They don't even have Quidditch coaches.

Shaun:

No, because they coach themselves - but Quidditch is a major part of the 
life of the school, and, that's the opportunity that gives them the chance 
to be professionals in the future. It is the school providing that.

Magpie:
> I said when he was at the same age. Meaning when Harry is
> 17 there is no indication that he's reached Viktor's level.
> Even if he wasn't saving the world he wouldn't be playing
> International Quidditch. He recognizes when he sees the
> professionals that they play at a much higher level than
> his team does at Hogwarts. Of course he could still become
> a professional player, just as Ginny and Oliver do. They'd
> just have to start seriously training after they left that
> school.

Shaun:

No, Harry doesn't show the same potential at 17 as Viktor - but considering 
Harry only got to play in less than half the matches he normally should have 
while he was at Hogwarts, that doesn't really tell us much (Harry plays in 
nine matches while at school. In a normal six year (Year Two - Year Seven) 
Quidditch career, a student could expect to play in 18 matches - Harry, 
potentially could have played in 21 with a seven year career. Oliver Wood 
played an estimated 14 matches, Angelina plays 13, the Weasley twins play 
11. Harry has a rather abbreviated career what with the competition being 
cancelled early in Chamber of Secrets, no competition at all in Goblet of 
Fire, and his suspension in Order of the Phoenix. There's also the added 
factor that for the last part of his school career, he's aware he's got a 
destiny outside Quidditch that is probably going to kill him.

Alla:
> This example was however brought up to counter your
> argument about Professor McGonagall never doing
> something against the rules, no?

Shaun:

I don't think so, because I haven't made that argument. I've argued that I 
can't remember her ever breaking a rule which is different.

Alla:
> Thus to me this shows that if she would be scolding
> Parvati for the rule that does not exist, that will
> not be the first time for her going against the rules.

Shaun:

There's a very fundamental difference, in my view, between getting a student 
an exemption from a rule from the Headmaster - which was what was done in 
Harry's case - and acting without authority of a school rule behind you - 
which is what is alleged in Parvarti's.Alla:


Alla:
> OOOO, this is what I call stellar canon evidence.
> And in fact I would say that if Hogwarts regulates
> their students' hair in a any way, shape or form,
> to me it would make a perfect sense to mention it
> here for the exact reason you described. I would
> think that it would have a great comic effect for
> Harry to worry about how he will deal with his hair
> while in school, to show him being extra nervous
> or something. However she mentions nothing of the
> sort. So yeah, this is a forbidden " me too" part
> of the post.

Shaun:

As I said above, this type of document isn't one where I would expect rules 
on hair to be mentioned. Similar documents don't normally serve that purpose 
in real world schools, so I can't see any reason to see why they at 
Hogwarts, and so the fact it doesn't, doesn't seem like evidence of much at 
all to me.

Sheryl and Ceridwyn have both made many of the points on this, I would make, 
and my messages get long enough anyway, so I'll leave that point for now.

a_svirn:
> I'd say it's a pretty inclusive list. What's showering
> has to do with uniforms? You don't need include shampoo
> and soap into the list of uniform requirements, it's absurd.
> But if you are getting your kid ready for a boarding school
> with specific (and very strict) hair regulations you need
> to know what they are. If you son sport dreadlocks and the
> school requires all boys to have a neat short haircut you'd
> have to take him to the barbers. If the school requires
> girls' bands, Alice bands and hairclips to be of specific
> colour you'd need to buy all those items, wouldn't you? Or
> some of them.

Shaun:

It's information you'd need to give parents only if it's information you 
didn't think they'd already know. When I started at my new school when I was 
13, going from a very ordinary school with very lax rules to a very 
prestigious and strict one, my new school didn't feel the need to tell my 
parents about all the things that would be different, because they knew any 
normally informed person in our society would understand things like what 
haircuts were acceptable etc. In the case of Hogwarts, where the parents of 
most non-Muggleborn students went to Hogwarts, it could easily assume 
parents know about Hogwarts rules, and we're told that muggleborn students 
have somebody who comes to tell them the things they need to know, there's 
no need to rely on books.

But, yes, if Hogwarts did require specific items like hairbands of a 
particular colour, say, that I would expect to be in the uniform list. But 
only if there's are actually specific items that need to be purchased - not 
just because some items are banned. It's not the same thing.

> a_svirn:
> What rules? That the Forbidden Forest and a certain corridor
> are forbidden? You don't include thing like that into a list
> of uniform requirement either. As for dungbombs and other
> Zonko products, not only it has nothing to do with uniforms,
> parents only need to have some rudimentary common sense to
> know that things like dungbombs aren't something you should
> equip your kid with.

Shaun:

Yes, and British parents with rudimentary commonsense also know that you 
don't send your child to school with weird hairstyles unless you absolutely 
know the school doesn't mind - and so wouldn't need to be told such things 
aren't allowed either.

Hogwarts seems to have a lot of rules that are written down - in Order of 
the Phoenix, we see Hermione unable to stop Friend and George from testing 
their products on themselves, because she's looked and she can't find a rule 
against it - that means there are written rules. Most of which parents 
aren't told about in any letter from Hogwarts.

Again, this is in line with real school practice. My school had rules on 
hair - we did get given copies of them (and copies of a lot of other rules) 
but we were given them after we started the school year, once we were at 
school. The school's view was that our parents didn't need to know them - 
they weren't the ones being expected to follow them. We were, so we had to 
know them.

Sheryll again:
>
> It's not at all an inclusive list. I see no mention of
> undergarments (which I'll agree wouldn't be regulated) or
> shoes, which I think would have *some* guidelines. I think
> it's safe to assume they don't go barefoot, so they are
> required to bring shoes. I also think it's safe to assume
> that the guidelines for everyday footwear don't include
> stiletto heels, which would be highly improper for classes
> like Herbology or Care of Magical Creatures. What is
> provided with the Hogwarts letter is a list of items the
> students would likely need to *purchase*, things they
> probably don't already have at home. Even Draco, coming
> from a well-to-do family, is seen going to Madame Malkin's
> to buy the necessary robes.

Shaun:

Yes, that's how I see it - it's a uniform list and a book list. Again, 
things, real schools have. Not a list of rules.

Just for the record, though, historically quite a large number of schools 
*did* regulate underwear (particularly girls schools). There are some that 
still do, but that is unusual - and in my view, would be a sign of a school 
that has gone totalitarian! It is also a very unusual requirement - not one 
I would assume applies at Hogwarts. That's the point - I wouldn't argue for 
an assumption an unusual requirement that exists in a few schools exists at 
Hogwarts. But a common requirement that exists in a lot of schools *and* 
which explains a particular teacher's behaviour - that's another matter.

Sheryll again:
> So JKR didn't draft a student handbook for us to read. I
> think it's safe to say something of the sort exists, either
> written to be handed to the students on arrival or verbally
> provided by prefects.

Shaun:

I'm sure there are written rules - and quite a lot of them. Hermione seems 
to consult them at least once as mentioned above.

Carol responds:
> Hogwarts should give Harry the same opportunities for
> professional training that it gives any other student.
> Do students with a talent for Transfiguration or Potions
> get special help at Hogwarts?

Shaun:

Yes, they do. Hermione's timeturner is a clear example of that, and it seems 
likely that Percy must have had one as well, given the number of OWLs he 
achieved. Hogwarts does assist unusually gifted students.

> Not unless you count the Slug Club. And Harry would have
> six years to play Quidditch. Given that he's a natural, it
> makes no difference. He wins games from the moment he first
> sits on a broom. He doesn't need teachers bending the rules
> for him and buying him the best broom available at the time.
> (As for real-world practice, I seem to recall the old USSR
> giving young athletes special training at the expense of
> their regular education. I don't see schools in the Free
> World giving special privileges to eleven-year-old
> prodigies.)

Shaun:

I do - often. But then again, I'm heavily involved in the education of 
gifted children (co-author of the Legacy Award winning 'High IQ Kids: 
Collected Insights, Information, and Personal Stories from the Experts' 
published in 2007) and so I have to be more aware of these things than most 
people.

My own school - and others like it - routintely gave 'special privileges' to 
'prodigies'. Including me, as it happens. Especially athletes - it's 
produced a lot of elite athletes over the years, and part of the reason for 
that is the support provided for them. Australia is part of the 'free 
world' - we've got special schools here for athletes. And for artists. As 
well as for the very bright. I know of similar schools in both the US and 
the UK.

Yes, the Soviet Union was famous for it. So was East Germany. And I don't 
know of any free world country that goes quite as deeply into it as they 
did. But I know of plenty of schools that do give them special treatment.

(Although not necessarily 'at the expense of their regular education'. At my 
school, all those who got 'special treatment' were still expected to meet 
the normal day to day requirements of the school in all but the most 
exceptional circumstances.)

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia 




From sistermagpie at earthlink.net  Wed May 27 15:54:01 2009
From: sistermagpie at earthlink.net (sistermagpie)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 15:54:01 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <C507CEA6D07940C5B40671E9C7E5790E@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gvjnmp+blf9@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186782

 Magpie:
> > This isn't about children not understanding that sometimes
> > rules should be bent in order to make things fair. This is
> > about this particular situation *not* being a case of rules
> > "bent" to make anything fair and any kid could see that.
> > The kids have to deal with that since they have no say in
> > the situation, but I don't think they'd also agree to call
> > it that as well.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> I don't see why not.
> 
> What is it about this situation that is inherently unfair? An exceptionally 
> good flyer is being given a chance to play Quidditch.
> 
> If we had a case where another first-year student had shown equal potential 
> and had been denied that chance, then, yes, the kids would undoubtedly find 
> it unfair.

Magpie:
That one first year gets to not only have a broom at school but the school buys him a spectacular one, while every other first year is not allowed to have a broom at school until second year and everybody else in the school has to bring their own or use school brooms, obviously. How does that make anything fair? Nobody in canon even suggests it's fair.

"If he shows potential" is something you've added retroactively as if that could be part of the rule to begin with and move the goalposts. Like if Draco Malfoy had been allowed a broom at school because his dad was on the school board and explained to them how good he was because he practiced at home it would only be unfair if there was some other kid with a parent on the school board who practiced at home. The rule says nothing about flying skill, nor does anybody else get brooms when they show they have skill. Even if they have the skill, they wouldn't recreate Harry's situation?that relied on McGonagall's personal desire to have Harry playing for her team as Seeker on a Nimbus 2000 immediately. 

 
> Magpie:
> > Substitute situations that are about being fair or general
> > ideas like "zero tolerance" are not relevant. Harry's being
> > given a broom by the school has nothing to do with a zero
> > tolerance policy on anything. I'm not sure why you listed
> > all these examples of school policies being enforced in a
> > ridiculous way (girl suspended for having a nail file) as
> > if their being unfair makes Harry's situation fair.
> 
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> The reason I mentioned them is quite simple. Because they illustrate what 
> happens in schools if we decide that being fair means treating every case as 
> if it's exactly the same without considering individual differences in those 
> cases. It doesn't lead to things being fairer. It leads to profound 
> unfairness. You get fairness when there is flexibility in how rules are 
> enforced.
> 
> I can see how somebody could reasonably argue that this particular case is 
> not one that leads to a fair result. I don't agree, but I can see why - 
> there's always room in particular cases for disagreement on where the line 
> between fair and unfair lies. My point is though that being flexible is not 
> always a bad thing. Being inflexible is.

Magpie:
Nobody's disagreeing with that. We've always been reasonably arguing that this particular case is not one that leads to a fair result. And that McGonagall's flexibility in this case shows her to not always care about being fair or following the rules if she personally gets something out of it. 

> Magpie:
> > There are no other cases that we know of that are identical to Harry's
> > since Harry's special treament is referred to a lot. Lots of kids have
> > the potential to play internationally someday. According to JKR Ginny
> > Weasley does play professionally and the rule isn't waived for her.
> > Nor is Harry's alleged professional potential ever shown to be a
> > motivation for anybody.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Harry doesn't just have potential. He shows it. That means the school is 
> aware of it. You can't blame a teacher for not nurturing unusual potential 
> they don't know about. But if they become aware of it, things change.

Magpie:
I can if that's what you're using to defend special treatment and gifts of luxury items for one student as just making things "fair." Not that I concede that this is the reason McGonagall buys Harry a broom or waives the rule anyway. She openly says her goal is the Quidditch cup and not Harry's personal development.

> Magpie:
> > Yeah, I noticed Harry never loses anything, really, as long
> > as he's conscious. But canonically, McGonagall doesn't really
> > care one way or the other how Harry nurtures his brilliant
> > talent. She just wants a Seeker for Gryffindor--and she wants
> > him playing on the best broom. Once she gets that, whether
> > Harry reaches his full potential as a professional player
> > is no concern of hers.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> Isn't it? It's Professor McGonagall's job to give Harry career advice in 
> fifth year. He doesn't tell her he wasnts to be a professional Quidditch 
> player. He tells her he wants to be an Auror. So she tells him what he needs 
> to do. In fact:
> 
> "'Potter,' she said in ringing tones, 'I will assist you to become an Auror 
> if it's the last thing I do! If I have to coach you nightly I will make sure 
> you receive the required results!'"
> 
> Now, admittedly, a lot of that is just her taking umbrage at Umbridge. But 
> the fact remains, when Harry discusses his future plans, she advises him on 
> the ones he tells her about. I assume she'd do that whatever he had come up 
> with.

Magpie:
Yes, it is her taking umbrage at Umbridge?another example of her offering special help to Harry for her own reasons and not because she's specifically nurturing of him as a war orphan. However, you still can't use Harry's not saying anything about Quidditch in his career chat to prove that McGonagall has done anything to train Harry to play Quidditch professionally. Had he said he wanted to play Quidditch sure she would have had to say something in return?perhaps say she'll recommend him for team captain the next year or something or suggest academic classes that might come in handy like Potions to make muscle ache ointments. But that's nothing like what you're trying to claim to defend her behavior in PS. There she plainly states she wants Harry to play Seeker for Gryffindor to win and gets Harry the best broom to do it. Nobody ever says anything about caring if Harry plays Quidditch professionally and nobody ever making an effort in that direction. All the evidence that this is anyone's goal is made up outside of canon and inserted in scenes that didn't happen. Harry himself seems completely unaware that McGonagall ever thought about him playing professionally. Once she breaks Snape's winning streak she loses interest.

 
> Magpie:
> > McGonagall does not let Harry break the rule because he's so good his
> > talent must be nurtured and she doesn't buy him a top of the line broom
> > because she's acting as his parent. She lets him play and buys him the
> > broom so that her team can have a Seeker riding on the best broom.
> > This is the reason given in canon. There is no evidence of McGonagall
> > or anyone else at the school feeling a personal responsibility to
> > nurture Harry's personal gifts as a flier. Nor is there any examples
> > of McGonagall acting as a parent in this kind of elaborately generous way.
> > Or really any way. She's not acting as a parent here, she's acting as
> > the house mistress and so "owner" of the Gryffindor team. Thank
> > goodness she isn't claiming to be acting on a sacred trust to look
> > after Harry as a war orphan by buying him the broom and letting him
> > play--the blatant benefits to herself and notable lack of motherly
> > feelings elsewhere would suggest some cynicism.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> A teacher in a position of being in loco parentis is *always* acting as a 
> parent. That's what the term means.
> 
> And you're assuming that Professor McGonagall doesn't have these 
> motivations. As a teacher, I'd assume she does. She knew and taught his 
> parents. She was there watching over the place he was going to be taken, the 
> day his parents died - years before she ever became his teacher or his Head 
> of House. Professor McGonagall is not a demonstrative mother-type figure 
> like Molly Weasley - but, yeah, I think she does feel a particular 
> responsibility for Harry.

Magpie:
My assumptions come from her behavior not just my own life. You're not just claiming here that McGonagall feels responsibility for Harry, which I agree with, you're claiming that it's that personal, motherly feeling that leads her to buy him a broom and nurture his flying at Quidditch. Which I reject since an entirely different motivation is given in canon. In canon she says she wants him to win for Gryffindor and never does anything to nurture his flying ability for its own sake. She's not acting in loco parentis when she buys the broom, she's acting in loco headmistress of a house with a Seeker-less Quidditch team. That's the canonical explanation for her behavior there. 

And btw, the fact that her actions could be said to be beneficial to Harry does not make them fair. I think it's beneficial to Draco Malfoy that Slughorn cuts him dead, but that doesn't make Slughorn anything like fair when he does it. (Not that I think Harry's having to wait until second year to play on the team or have his own broom at school would have been detrimental to Harry. Any number of kids could have gotten similar benefits out of the same treatment.) 
 
> Magpie:
> > So since legitimate scholarship programs exist a teacher
> > getting the "no first years may have their own brooms at
> > school" and buying him a top of the line model must be
> > totally like a scholarship program? I don't think so.
> > Any example of favoritism, bias, prejudice or unequal
> > dealings with students could be justified that way.
> 
> Shaun:
> As for buying Harry a broom, I recently bought one my students a laptop 
> computer. As it happens, he's not one of my favourite students. Not even 
> close. What he is is a student who can benefit from having a computer in a 
> way none of my other students could and who had nobody else who'd ever be 
> willing to buy him one. I've also bought a pair of glasses for a student in 
> the last year or so.

Magpie:
Great. But it seems like you're projecting your motives onto McGonagall and acting like that makes them just as much canon as the explanation she actually gives, which is that she wants Gryffindor to win. She says nothing about Harry benefiting from a broom more than any other student?nor is there any reason to believe he would. And he certainly doesn't have to go without unless he can find somebody willing to buy him one, since he can afford his own broom. 

This strong need for him to play lasts until Snape's streak is broken--or until the plot doesn't need her to swoop in any more. So there's any number of times when McGonagall might have been personally upset by Harry's broom situation but isn't. 

Personally, if I were going for the student who could have benefitted from somebody buying him something it'd been Ron who spends a whole year with a broken wand. Not Harry, who has school brooms at his disposal. Nobody even considers getting Ron a wand that actually works. 

> Magpie:
> > No, he isn't. The fact the professional players come from
> > Hogwarts does not mean they are being trained to be
> > professionals at Hogwarts. They're not being trained at
> > all. They don't even have Quidditch coaches.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> No, because they coach themselves - but Quidditch is a major part of the 
> life of the school, and, that's the opportunity that gives them the chance 
> to be professionals in the future. It is the school providing that.

Magpie:
They coach themselves, exactly. The school's providing them a pitch doesn't add up to the school training them at anything. You don't need to play at Hogwarts to have a chance to play professionally in the future. The set up the school has towards Quidditch once again supports McGonagall's motivation as stated in canon rather than the motivation you're assigning her: Quidditch is an arena for house rivalry. A contrast to, say, Potions where they don't just give the kids access to an ingredients cupboard, cauldrons and an empty room and let them teach themselves. 

 
> Magpie:
> > I said when he was at the same age. Meaning when Harry is
> > 17 there is no indication that he's reached Viktor's level.
> > Even if he wasn't saving the world he wouldn't be playing
> > International Quidditch. He recognizes when he sees the
> > professionals that they play at a much higher level than
> > his team does at Hogwarts. Of course he could still become
> > a professional player, just as Ginny and Oliver do. They'd
> > just have to start seriously training after they left that
> > school.
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> No, Harry doesn't show the same potential at 17 as Viktor - but considering 
> Harry only got to play in less than half the matches he normally should have 
> while he was at Hogwarts, that doesn't really tell us much (Harry plays in 
> nine matches while at school. 

Magpie:
A few more matches would make much difference, given Harry's description of the difference between Viktor and everyone in his league. Harry may always win, but he's not leaving everyone in the dust as if he's Viktor (who himself gets no matches for a year) flying like he did at the QWC. Even if Harry had played in every match he would only be that: a kid who practices with his team and plays in matches at school. Occasionally he plays pick up games at the Weasley's. He cares about it when there's a game against another house and otherwise is happy to follow professional teams. He never acts like a kid training to be a professional and he's never treated as one. That's not to say he couldn't have done that after Hogwarts since he has the talent, but that doesn't retroactively make McGonagall's actions in PS the first step in her personal nurturing of his talent. 

 Alla:
> > This example was however brought up to counter your
> > argument about Professor McGonagall never doing
> > something against the rules, no?
> 
> Shaun:
> 
> I don't think so, because I haven't made that argument. I've argued that I 
> can't remember her ever breaking a rule which is different.

Magpie:
Because when she breaks a rule it doesn't count?

-m






From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 27 21:54:06 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 21:54:06 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <C507CEA6D07940C5B40671E9C7E5790E@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gvkcpu+svpq@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186783

Shaun wrote:
> <snip> The thing is though, Professor McGonagall's classes don't seem involve memorising a lot of spells. I don't believe we ever learn the name of a spell in a Transfiguration class. When Moody/Crouch transfgures Draco into a ferret, he doesn't say a spell - nor does Professor McGonagall say one when she turns him back. Not all magic seems to require the use of spells with complicated names. Transfiguration is a lot more about theory. <snip>

Carol responds:

I'm just going to respond to this one point since I don't want to go back over the unprovable argument as to whether Hogwarts has a rule regarding hair ornaments or not. (As I said, I'm quite sure that McGonagall is just extremely anxious for the students of her House to make a good impression on the visitors. That much is clear from the canon that has already been cited.)

However, I don't think we can conclude from the fact that the teachers and other adults don't speak spells aloud when they're performing Transfiguration that no spell is required. (I do suspect, however, that some feats of advanced Transfiguration, like turning into an animal, require intense concentration on your goal or intention rather like the mental process involved in Apparition.)

I think that the adults are merely performing nonverbal spells. The narrator in HBP informs us that Snape isn't the only teacher who expects the students to learn nonverbal spells in sixth year. McGonagall and Flitwick expect it, too. Hermione, for example, performs Specialis Revelio nonverbally in Potions; Harry and Ron overhear Ernie whispering the same spell and use it themselves. (Whether it's a charm or a Transfiguration spell, I don't know, but it's certainly not a DADA spell.) Before sixth year, all the spells that the students perform regardless of subject involve spoken incantations. Whether it's turning a hedgehog into a pin cushion or Vanishing a mouse, the spell requires an incantation and, until sixth year, that incantation would be spoken. (It would probably be whispered well into sixth year.) 

We learn the Vanishing Spell, Evanesco, from, IIRC, Snape (who on other occasions Vanishes spilled potions nonverbally. Vanishing is a Transfiguration spell, not a charm. We also learn (in one of McGonagall's homework assignments) the spell for conjuring an inanimate object, Inanimatus Conjurus. (I assume that the spell for conjuring animals, such as Hermione's birds, is Animatus Conjurus.) I can't recall any other Transfiguration spells offhand, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a charm and a Transfiguration spell. (Surely, turning vinegar into wine would be elementary Transfiguration, but HRH attempt it in Charms class in fifth or sixth year.)

Carol, who thinks that if Transfiguration were all or mostly about theory, neither Harry nor Ron would have received Es on their Transfiguration OWLs




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Wed May 27 22:15:46 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 22:15:46 -0000
Subject: Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <gvjnmp+blf9@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvke2i+n4pi@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186784

Shaun wrote:
> > 
> > No, Harry doesn't show the same potential at 17 as Viktor - but considering  Harry only got to play in less than half the matches he normally should have while he was at Hogwarts, that doesn't really tell us much (Harry plays in nine matches while at school. 
> 
Magpie responded:
> A few more matches would make much difference, given Harry's description of the difference between Viktor and everyone in his league. Harry may always win, but he's not leaving everyone in the dust as if he's Viktor (who himself gets no matches for a year) flying like he did at the QWC. Even if Harry had played in every match he would only be that: a kid who practices with his team and plays in matches at school. Occasionally he plays pick up games at the Weasley's. He cares about it when there's a game against another house and otherwise is happy to follow professional teams. He never acts like a kid training to be a professional and he's never treated as one. That's not to say he couldn't have done that after Hogwarts since he has the talent, but that doesn't retroactively make McGonagall's actions in PS the first step in her personal nurturing of his talent. 

Carol adds:

First, a minor point. Only nine matches are depicted, but that doesn't mean that Harry played in only nine matches any more than the three or four Potions classes per year that we see are the only Potions classes he attended.

On more point in support of Magpie, whose snipped arguments I also agree with. If McGonagall were considered about Harry's future as a future professional Quidditch player, wouldn't she have rushed in to buy him a new broom when the Whomping Willow broke his Nimbus 2000 into splinters? But she does no such thing; evidently, having once or twice won back the Quidditch Cup from Slytherin, it's no longer a big deal to her. Instead, once Harry gets a Firebolt, an even better broom than the Nimbus 2000 (but not yet extant in Harry's first year), she confiscates it, acting on Hermione's fear that the broom was sent by Sirius Black and has been hexed or jinxed. She and Flitwick strip it down completely, keeping it for several weeks, IIRC, while Harry is forced to use a school broom to practice until and unless he buys a new one of his own (which he doesn't do because he only wants the Firebolt back). If she were so concerned with his needing a good broom to be the best possible Quidditch player, she's have bought or lent him a new one. Instead, her concern in this instance is his safety. She's not at all concerned with what Harry wants or even, for once, with winning a match.

Carol, who can understand a teacher "bending" a rule if it really concerns the students' safety or well-being, but in this case, as Magpie says, the whole point of the rule-bending is to give Gryffindor a Seeker who can beat Slytherin, even if that Seeker is eleven years old




From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Wed May 27 22:24:32 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 22:24:32 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gvfll5+nl6l@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvkej0+k628@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186785

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "horridporrid03" <horridporrid03 at ...> wrote:
>
> > >>jkoney:
> > <snip> I still don't agree with the fact that none of the Malfoy's were sent to prison for at least some punishment.
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Are we ever told they weren't? *is curious*  But yes, we're not told that they were.  I think we're supposed to pretty much forget about the Malfoys in the end. Maybe as failed also-rans to the more effective Death Eaters?

jkoney:
We were only told they didn't by JKR. Nothing in DH as far as I can remember.


> 
> > > >Betsy Hp:
> > > <snip> As someone who grew up with "Malory Towers" (a "school-days" series) Draco seemed prime to become Harry's best friend. Everything about our first scene with him screamed "learning moment to come".  So that's an example of my personal experience trumping what the author was trying to get across.
> 
> > >>jkoney:
> > Aren't you then ignoring what was written?
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> No, because what was written fit the trope so well. I do agree that my personal experience led me in a different direction than JKR was meaning to direct me, but I wasn't completely ignoring the text.  I just interpreted it differently.

jkoney:
Um, wasn't my original point that people didn't intrepret what she wrote correctly? 

> 
> > >>jkoney:
> > If not at that point, which I didn't read as generously as you did, what about the train scene? Draco insults Ron and then threatens Harry about meeting the same end as his parents. I definitely think the author is trying to say that these two aren't going to be friends.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > >>jkoney:
> > You thought he still wanted to be friends with Harry? 
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Yes. :)  Otherwise, why not spill the beans?  (That's actually a lingering question: why didn't Draco tell? The "he wanted to capture them himself," response is only reasonable if we totally ignore Draco's character. Really, Draco's constant hovering around Harry over the years is hard to explain.)

jkoney:
Draco did tell on Harry when he was caught by McGonegall. She just didn't believe him.

The "hovering" was Draco's way of trying to bully Harry and his friends or get them in trouble. Boys especially like to try and get a pecking order. Draco's attempts failed because Harry recognized him for what he was, a bully wannabe. After growing up with the Dursley's and dealing with Snape, Draco had no chance to try and dominate Harry.







From horridporrid03 at yahoo.com  Thu May 28 01:08:12 2009
From: horridporrid03 at yahoo.com (horridporrid03)
Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 01:08:12 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gvkej0+k628@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvko5t+231a@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186786

> >>jkoney:
> > > Aren't you then ignoring what was written?

> >>Betsy Hp:
> > No, because what was written fit the trope so well. I do agree that my personal experience led me in a different direction than JKR was meaning to direct me, but I wasn't completely ignoring the text.  I just interpreted it differently.

> >>jkoney:
> Um, wasn't my original point that people didn't intrepret what she wrote correctly? 

Betsy Hp:
Gosh, I have no idea! I jumped into this mid-conversation.  (I suspect there's a lesson to be learned here... *g*) I do agree though, that JKR failed to give me a proper view of Draco. (I'm assuming, at this point, that readers were supposed to strongly dislike Draco pretty much on sight.) I do, however, put the failure more strongly on JKR's side than mine.  I interpreted based on what I was given by the author.

> >>Pippin:
> It only fits the trope if you ignore the existence of Ron. <snip>

Betsy Hp:
Oh, not true! Ron just added yet *another* trope (more strongly shown in the second book, I'll admit): the blood feud.  Even *more* lessons to be learned, thought I. :D  Plus...

> >>Montavilla47:
> It's not like you have to chose between Ron and Draco... <snip> 

Betsy Hp:
Exactly!  And your tying Harry-Ron-Draco with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"'s Buffy-Willow-Cordelia is dead on, I think.  As a viewer I could never have chosen between Willow and Cordelia, and I'm glad I didn't have to. :)

> >>Betsy Hp:
> > <snip> (That's actually a lingering question: why didn't Draco tell? The "he wanted to capture them himself," response is only reasonable if we totally ignore Draco's character. Really, Draco's constant hovering around Harry over the years is hard to explain.)

> >>jkoney:
> Draco did tell on Harry when he was caught by McGonegall. She just didn't believe him.

Betsy Hp:
Yes, but that was way late in the game and pretty much in self-defense. He had to explain why he'd leaped out onto McGonagall, after all.

> >>Pippin:
> Telling on Hagrid wouldn't get Harry in trouble. Draco had to catch Harry without any adults to take the blame instead. But he was a little too late, and McGonagall didn't believe there was a dragon at all.

Betsy Hp:
Why not tell Snape (a friendly ear as far as Draco knew) either when he saw the Trio heading down to Hagrid's cottage, or when he knew they were moving the dragon?  Why sneak out at night and try and capture them himself?  Did he expect to drag them *and* the dragon to the nearest prefect or something?  Especially since he didn't have his usual backup, this was very strange behavior on Draco's part, imo.

But, as I've freely admitted, I have a hard time following JKR's reasoning with this character (among many, many other things *g*).  I'm sure this was just Draco fulfilling his role of fly in Harry's soup.  JKR ordered up a standard school-yard bully from central casting and Draco was her result. (Though I still think there was some garbling in the original order, Draco was *way* too vulnerable to play 'bully' well.)

Betsy Hp




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Thu May 28 02:01:44 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 02:01:44 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gvkej0+k628@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvkra8+mp51@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186787

jkoney wrote:
> Um, wasn't my original point that people didn't intrepret what she wrote correctly? 

Carol responds:

The problem is, there's no "right" reading, including JKR's own, which is often inconsistent with or unsupported by canon. She remembers her own books incorrectly, whether it's the Slytherins returning with Slughorn (maybe they did, but Harry didn't see them and so the narrator didn't report them) or Draco's already having a hand of Glory and Ron's knowing about it or skulls in the Slytherin Common Room.

Any reading, whether it matches JKR's stated intentions or not, is a "right" reading as long as it can be supported by the text. It's only "wrong" when the next book reveals it as wrong (as Betsy's reading of Draco as Harry's future best friend turned out to be). Until DH came out, both DDM!Snape and ESE!Snape were valid readings because the evidence for both was in the text. We just didn't know which were clues and which were red herrings till we found out in "The Prince's Tale."

But there are still many matters for which we have no official canon explanation, or for which the canon explanation is unclear or incomplete (the Elder Wand, for example, or the whole concept of "the Master of Death"). We're still debating character's motivations (and whether there's a rule against hair clips shaped like butterflies!).

There is not and can never be a single "right" reading of the books. If there were, this list would not exist.

Carol, who takes any author's stated intentions with a grain of salt, whether that author is JKR, Herman Melville, or Stephen King




From happyjoeysmiley at yahoo.com  Thu May 28 06:51:55 2009
From: happyjoeysmiley at yahoo.com (happyjoeysmiley)
Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 06:51:55 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 20
In-Reply-To: <gvidcd+6jm6@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvlcab+5pdc@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186788

> Carol wrote:
[snip]
> 
> 
> And yet, despite Ron's protests, Harry quite deliberately says Voldemort's name as if it were still superstitious nonsense not to do so.
> 
> "Come on, Hermione. Why are you so determined not to admit it? Vol--"
> 
> "HARRY, NO!"
> 
> "--demort's after the Elder Wand!"
> 
> "The name's Taboo!" Ron bellowed, leaping to his feet as a loud crack sounded outside the tent. "I told you, Harry, I told you, we can't say it anymore--we've got to put the protection back around us quickly--it's how they find--" (DH Am. ed. 444-45).
> 
> But it's too late. Despite Ron's warnings and his attempt to stop Harry, he says the name, anyway, and brings near-disaster on them all. 

[snip]

Joey:

I don't know but I thought that Harry *absent-mindedly* mentions the name *while* Ron was *simultaneously* shouting "HARRY, NO!" - more because of Harry's usual habit of using the name.

That's how I construed the hyphen ending the sentence "Come on, Hermione. Why are you so determined not to admit it? Vol--" and the one preceding the sentence "--demort's after the Elder Wand!" with Ron's yell inserted in the middle.

> Carol wrote:
> Too bad Harry didn't think to just call him Riddle.

Joey:

Agreed. I thought so too.

Cheers,
~Joey :-)





From jkoney65 at yahoo.com  Thu May 28 20:57:34 2009
From: jkoney65 at yahoo.com (jkoney65)
Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 20:57:34 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gvkra8+mp51@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvmtru+49v1@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186789

I hate when your post gets lost b/c I'm sure I don't remember everything I wrote the first time.

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> jkoney wrote:
> > Um, wasn't my original point that people didn't intrepret what she wrote correctly? 
> 
> Carol responds:
> 
> The problem is, there's no "right" reading, including JKR's own, which is often inconsistent with or unsupported by canon. She remembers her own books incorrectly, whether it's the Slytherins returning with Slughorn (maybe they did, but Harry didn't see them and so the narrator didn't report them) or Draco's already having a hand of Glory and Ron's knowing about it or skulls in the Slytherin Common Room.

jkoney:
I disagree. I think the author has a much better idea of the character, their backround, and the plot compared to any of us. I think some things may have been edited out and a consistancy check wasn't done well or I believe the author has the idea in their notes and believes they have written it (otherwise things wouldn't make sense) in some fashion. So when they get questioned they like of course the Slytherins returned....

If the author is alive and has just recently finished the book I believe we can rely on their memory for what they were writing. As time goes on, I believe they can be believed if they have looked through their notes.


> Carol
> Any reading, whether it matches JKR's stated intentions or not, is a "right" reading as long as it can be supported by the text. It's only "wrong" when the next book reveals it as wrong (as Betsy's reading of Draco as Harry's future best friend turned out to be). Until DH came out, both DDM!Snape and ESE!Snape were valid readings because the evidence for both was in the text. We just didn't know which were clues and which were red herrings till we found out in "The Prince's Tale."

jkoney:
But in this case their is a straightforward right way of reading the interactions of Harry and Draco. By the time the scene on the train is over, if you still believe they are going to be friends then you aren't actually reading the story as it is written. Just because something happened in another book doesn't mean it is going to happen in this one. That is adding things that don't exist to this story.

By the time those first two Harry Draco scenes are over, Harry knows more than enough about Draco: bully, arrogant, etc. that he isn't going to be friends with him. He just left the Dursley's why would he want to hang around with the same type of person?



> Carol
> But there are still many matters for which we have no official canon explanation, or for which the canon explanation is unclear or incomplete (the Elder Wand, for example, or the whole concept of "the Master of Death"). We're still debating character's motivations (and whether there's a rule against hair clips shaped like butterflies!).

jkoney:
I agree their are a few things like the elder wand that I would like to have more details on. On others I believe JKR thought we would use some common sense and know that wizards went to the toilet, showered, shaved, etc. 

She would think that we would understand that Hogwarts was based on the British boarding school ideas and that they had dress codes. She doesn't go into detail but she gives us a uniform list. From their she expects us to extrapolate to a dress code that these schools would have, such as rules for clothes, shoes, hair, nails and jewelry. All things dress codes normally have. 

That line was an unforgettable one to me. It never occurred to me that McGonegall was doing anything but enforcing (IMO, the obvious) the dress code during a high profile school event. I remember teachers being stressed at these type of events and enforcing every little rule. (I had to dry shave because my cheezy little mustache was showing and it was seen before one event)

> Carol
> There is not and can never be a single "right" reading of the books. If there were, this list would not exist.
> 
>jkoney
Well I still think Harry is the hero of the book even though I've had people tell me he's not. 





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Fri May 29 03:33:43 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 03:33:43 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gvmtru+49v1@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvnl2n+2o7u@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186790

Carol earlier:
> > 
> > The problem is, there's no "right" reading, including JKR's own, which is often inconsistent with or unsupported by canon. She remembers her own books incorrectly, whether it's the Slytherins returning with Slughorn (maybe they did, but Harry didn't see them and so the narrator didn't report them) or Draco's already having a hand of Glory and Ron's knowing about it or skulls in the Slytherin Common Room.
> 
> jkoney:
> I disagree. I think the author has a much better idea of the character, their backround, and the plot compared to any of us. I think some things may have been edited out and a consistancy check wasn't done well or I believe the author has the idea in their notes and believes they have written it (otherwise things wouldn't make sense) in some fashion. So when they get questioned they like of course the Slytherins returned....
> 
> If the author is alive and has just recently finished the book I believe we can rely on their memory for what they were writing. As time goes on, I believe they can be believed if they have looked through their notes.

Carol again:
What the author can tell us about her book or her intentions in writing her book is only helpful to some degree with regard to specific characters and circumstances and only if the intentions are actually realized within the book itself. Let's say that she intends Ginny to be Harry's ideal wife (as she does). Not every reader is going to agree with her. Or she intends Dumbledore to be "the epitome of goodness." Again, not every reader will agree that she has succeeded in transferring her intention from her own mind to the text itself.

The thing about literary analysis is that it starts with the text itself and then *analyzes* it. It sounds as if I'm stating the obvious, but my point is that words on a page do not have a single obvious meaning. Sometimes they're deliberately misleading (JKR is fond of red herrings and misdirection). We can't always believe the narrator, who sees from Harry's point of view, nor can we always believe the characters, even the good ones. Sometimes we're told straight out what really happened (although there are usually gaps in the story); sometimes we have to figure out for ourselves that the explanations the characters have given are wrong or inadequate. Was Harry right or wrong that Draco had a Dark Mark, for example? We aren't told, and he was on the tower before the DEs set up a barrier that only someone with a Dark Mark could pass through. So we have to sift the evidence for ourselves and arrive at our own conclusions. (In this case, there may indeed be a "right" answer that only JKR knows, but she hasn't given it and it's not in the books themselves.)

But literary analysis usually operates on a more sophisticated level. We could look, for example, at the influence of life at the Dursleys on Harry. The story states nothing directly except the incidents themselves and Harry's immediate reaction, but we could argue, for example, that life with the Dursleys was an instance of good coming out of evil (a common motif in the books). It may have toughened him or given him a resilience that, say, the pampered James would not have had. I think we can safely say that it prevented him from sharing Ron's fear of spiders (which derives from the Twins, particularly Fred). Or we could analyze the effects of having the Twins as older brothers on Ron.

And the influence of one character on another is only one of many things we can examine that JKR never talks about in her interviews and the narrator doesn't state directly in the books. We can look at the parallels between Harry and some other character, say Neville or Snape or LV, and explore their significance.

We can talk about influences on JKR's writing (in which case, it would be nice to have her input; we don't want to assume that she's read a book she's never heard of). Or we can explore the role of mythology or English boarding school culture or Christianity or any number of elements. We can look at genre. In what ways are the books mystery stories? In what ways does Harry's story match the hero's journey? In what ways is it a Bildungsroman? What about elements of the Gothic novel?

There's a lot more to literary analysis than the author's stated intentions can tell us. What we need to do is examine the text itself, looking for irony, ambiguity, narrative technique, influences, parallels, and many other things. We have to look beyond the literal meaning of the words on the page, which may be ambiguous or misleading or incomplete or just plain wrong (as when Harry will surely die from a Crucio, for example). We need to put it all together. But unlike a jigsaw puzzle, in which there's only one right solution, there are an infinite number of valid readings. (Of course, there are also obviously wrong readings as well, those that are not supported by or are in conflict with the text. "Fenrir Greyback is a tragic hero" is pretty clearly a wrong reading, for example. So is "Wormtail's hand is the unnamed fourth Deathly Hallow.")
> 
Carol earlier:
> > Any reading, whether it matches JKR's stated intentions or not, is a "right" reading as long as it can be supported by the text. It's only "wrong" when the next book reveals it as wrong (as Betsy's reading of Draco as Harry's future best friend turned out to be). Until DH came out, both DDM!Snape and ESE!Snape were valid readings because the evidence for both was in the text. We just didn't know which were clues and which were red herrings till we found out in "The Prince's Tale."
> 
jkoney:
> But in this case their is a straightforward right way of reading the interactions of Harry and Draco. By the time the scene on the train is over, if you still believe they are going to be friends then you aren't actually reading the story as it is written. Just because something happened in another book doesn't mean it is going to happen in this one. That is adding things that don't exist to this story.
> 
> By the time those first two Harry Draco scenes are over, Harry knows more than enough about Draco: bully, arrogant, etc. that he isn't going to be friends with him. He just left the Dursley's why would he want to hang around with the same type of person?
> 
Carol:
Yes, "Draco is destined to be Harry's best friend" is a "wrong" reading (though I can see why Betsy read that trope into the first book). But we still interpret Draco Malfoy in different ways. Even Harry learns to see him with new eyes, somewhat sympathetically, and Draco himself evolves as a character. That's the type of thing that's subject to analysis. We could ask how the Malfoys function in the novel and what it means to us as readers (regardless of JKR's intention) that they survived relatively unscathed, already having been punished quite severely by LV himself. Note the irony that they would have remained loyal to him had he not done so.
 
> > Carol
> > But there are still many matters for which we have no official canon explanation, or for which the canon explanation is unclear or incomplete (the Elder Wand, for example, or the whole concept of "the Master of Death"). We're still debating character's motivations (and whether there's a rule against hair clips shaped like butterflies!).
> 
> jkoney:
> I agree their are a few things like the elder wand that I would like to have more details on. On others I believe JKR thought we would use some common sense and know that wizards went to the toilet, showered, shaved, etc. 

Carol responds:
Yes, but those things aren't matters for literary analysis. However, we might examine the sorts of things that JKR takes for granted and see where that leads us.

jkoney: 
> She would think that we would understand that Hogwarts was based on the British boarding school ideas and that they had dress codes. She doesn't go into detail but she gives us a uniform list. From their she expects us to extrapolate to a dress code that these schools would have, such as rules for clothes, shoes, hair, nails and jewelry. All things dress codes normally have. 
> 
> That line was an unforgettable one to me. It never occurred to me that McGonegall was doing anything but enforcing (IMO, the obvious) the dress code during a high profile school event. I remember teachers being stressed at these type of events and enforcing every little rule. (I had to dry shave because my cheezy little mustache was showing and it was seen before one event)

Carol responds:
Whereas it never occurred to me that she was doing anything except wanting the students in her House to look their best and not embarrass the school. That there might be a rule against wearing colorful hair decorations during the TWT (which happens extremely rarely) never occurred to me. And, of course, any such rules if they exist are suspended for the Yule Ball. It's clear that such regulations don't normally exist or Luna couldn't wear her much more ridiculous accessories, presumably to class though she doesn't have any classes with Harry. And the High Inquisitor herself wouldn't wear a pink Alice band or perky little hair bows in OoP. It might set a bad example for the children.

> > Carol
> > There is not and can never be a single "right" reading of the books. If there were, this list would not exist.
> > 
> >jkoney
> Well I still think Harry is the hero of the book even though I've had people tell me he's not.

Carol:
I think we can agree that not seeing Harry as the hero qualifies as a "wrong" reading. (I did read one interesting article arguing for Snape as hero, but that's only because Harry for some reason failed to meet that critic's criteria for a hero.)

Carol, who would be interested in seeing JKR's notes for any light they might shed on the books but would consider them as secondary canon at best since they only reveal what she intended to do or might have done but didn't





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sat May 30 03:22:05 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 03:22:05 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 21-22
Message-ID: <gvq8ot+4cvj@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186791

So these two chapters left me with the wierd feeling all over again and this time of the good variety wierd feeling.

I mean, believe me I had been rereading the books I like more than once during my life and as some of you know I read a lot. And I certainly reread all HP books but OOP several times. I guess third time is a charm for DH, because I feel as if I am getting some answers to the questions that I still had and I do not feel that those questions were just about the details.

For example, for quite some time I had been wondering what the hell was the point of introducing Luna in the series if there was any point besides just introducing her for the sake of introducing new character.

I mean, I get that her eccentricities can be funny (I for the most part find them annoying), and certainly I get the point of looking beneath the surface and for Harry to learn that she is a nice sweet person, etc.

I also remember JKR saying something along the lines that Luna was meant to be an opposite to Hermione, logic to faith, etc. But the thing is while I very often accept the interviews, I still take them as statement of intent only when I see at least some support for it in the book. And I did not quite see it, I mean, I certainly saw Hermione arguing and contradicting what Luna is saying, etc, I just did not see Luna as faith if that makes sense. Yes, I know the whole point of faith is that you have to take something **on faith**, but to me in the book I would have thought that we should have seen support for some of Luna's claims that what she claims existed, exists, no matter how improbable it seemed initially for Hermione and everybody else.

And here we have these chapters about Hallows history, real and imaginary and I am thinking is it that simple? Was the whole reason of introducing Luna to make a point about Hallows and how Hermione cannot accept their existance on faith and Harry does? And while Luna is not here, I am thinking probably the point is that she influenced him to a degree to accept improbable?

"Luna has told me all about you, young lady," said Xenophilius, you are, I gather, not unintelligent, but painfully limited. Narrow. Close-minded." - p.333

Alla:

I mean, I get that this is exactly what Lovegoods would have thought about Hermione, but in a sense to me this is the first time when I cans ee some support not for her being stupid of course, but for being close-minded in a real way?


"But that's - I"m sorry, but that's completely ridiculous! how can I possibly prove it doesn't exist? Do you expect me to hold of - of all pebbles of the world, and test them? I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!' - p.334

Alla:

HAHA. Beatiful, Hermione for all her intelligence, for all her pointing the biblical quotes to Harry on his parents' stone cannot make the leap to faith, to believe when it really counts.

And that leads me to another shocking revelation of the sorts. And it IS shocking to me, because it is not like I forgot the events of these chapters, but why did I not realise that while I was getting annoyed that Hermione never learned the humility and the possibility that she can be wrong in spectacular way, she just may have been learning a lesson in non-spectacular way in this chapters about being wrong?

Interesting.

Alla




From happyjoeysmiley at yahoo.com  Sat May 30 04:01:49 2009
From: happyjoeysmiley at yahoo.com (happyjoeysmiley)
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 04:01:49 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 21-22
In-Reply-To: <gvq8ot+4cvj@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvqb3d+of51@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186792

> Alla wrote:
[snip] 
> And that leads me to another shocking revelation of the sorts. And it IS shocking to me, because it is not like I forgot the events of these chapters, but why did I not realise that while I was getting annoyed that Hermione never learned the humility and the possibility that she can be wrong in spectacular way, she just may have been learning a lesson in non-spectacular way in this chapters about being wrong?

[snip]

Joey:

I think she did realize that she could go wrong in a spectacular way even when she realized that Draco was indeed doing a DE's job on LV's orders like Harry had surmised [HBP Climax - scenes in the hospital wing when Harry arrives post DD's death and explains what all had happened] 

I wonder if she was learning this lesson in chapters 21-22 DH because she tells Harry that the visit was a complete waste of time like Godric Hollow and scoffs at Harry's ideas about the Hallows.

I think she learnt a lesson (in a spectacular way, may be) about being wrong when she learns that Harry was indeed right about the Elder Wand [even Harry pointedly notices that she looks "flabbergasted" when Ollivander confirms the existence of Elder Wand]

Cheers,
~Joey :-)




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sat May 30 14:51:25 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 14:51:25 -0000
Subject: Prophecies and Chosen Ones
Message-ID: <gvrh5d+kkbb@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186793

The reason why I was thinking about Prophecy in Harry Potter series again  even though we discussed it gazillion times is because I recently read the final book in the Last Olympian series by Rick Riordan, where prophecy and the chosen one also feature rather prominently.

Now, we all have our disappointments and satisfactions in the series, I am sure I had said it in the past that as plot development the introduction of the Prophecy easily is among my top three disappointments. The biggest adjustments as a reader I had to make did not come after I read DH, oh no, that was after I read OOP. I had to decide whether I could still continue not even reading, I am sure I would have wanted to finish the series anyway, but whether I could love them as much as I did before when the huge element of surprise for the ending was gone for me. Of course when I am speaking about surprise, I am talking about it in the most general sense possible, obviously I did not take lessons with Professor Trelawney and could not predict Horcruxes, Hallows, etc. But I (as I am sure millions other readers) now knew that this Harry's Deeeeestiny and all that it will come down to eventually is how prophecy will play out.

While as I said I of course did not predict any of these things, I cannot say that I saw any twist in how Prophecy came to fruition. The one with the power to kill the Dark Lord approaches? Yep, here we have Harry. Neither can live while the other survives? Yes, indeedy - horcruxes came to play and here we have Harry alive and Voldie dead.

Was I disappointed at the end? No, not really, I was heavily invested in the characters, I really wanted Harry live, so I was happy. But I cannot help but think that Rick Riordan did way better job with the Prophecy by introducing excellent excellent twist at the end. Because seriously, I do know that Prophecy is a widespread device of the genre, but with all the talk of subverting it, transforming it, with the use of this plot device I quite honestly saw nothing of the sort.

 Were you initially disappointed when prophecy was introduced? Were you happy how Prophecy played out?

Alla





From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sat May 30 15:14:26 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 15:14:26 -0000
Subject: DH reread CH 21-22
In-Reply-To: <gvq8ot+4cvj@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvrigi+9sut@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186794

Alla wrote:
<snip>
> For example, for quite some time I had been wondering what the hell was the point of introducing Luna in the series if there was any point besides just introducing her for the sake of introducing new character.
> 
> I mean, I get that her eccentricities can be funny (I for the most part find them annoying), and certainly I get the point of looking beneath the surface and for Harry to learn that she is a nice sweet person, etc.
> 
> I also remember JKR saying something along the lines that Luna was meant to be an opposite to Hermione, logic to faith, etc. <snip>

Carol responds:

You're right about the contrast between Hermione and Luna (Hermione finally doubts something that she found in a book!) and about Hermione finally being wrong or understanding that she was wrong without actually saying so, but I think there's a lot more to Luna than being a foil to Hermione.

I think she represents not only childlike faith (which, in terms of the afterlife, turns out to be true), but innocence, one of those things, like love and House Elves (and death), that are beyond Voldemort's understanding.

She serves several important purposes, IMO, in addition to the one you mentioned of Harry's slow recognition of her worth as a person. In OoP, she's the one who comforts him with her certainty that she'll see her mother again in the afterlife and that, by extension, Harry will see his godfather, too. She, like Harry, can see Thestrals and hear the voices behind the Veil, giving them a bond that he doesn't share with Ron and Hermione, but, unlike Harry, she intuitively understands what Hermione knows only by reading, that the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. (Wonder if she's ever read John Donne? :-) )

In DH, she rises to the occasion in a different way from Neville, whose latent qualities as a leader arise out of necessity. Luna, in contrast, shows the virtue of fortitude, enduring hardship and suffering with courage and serenity. Mr. Ollivander, who thanks her for her companionship with a new wand to replace her lost one, might not have survived or at least maintained his sanity without her. At any rate, her sweetness and eternal optimism make the last portion of his captivity bearable.

And there's the story of her father, too, deprived of his treasure and driven to violate his principles in his desperation to get her back. He's like a mirror to Narcissa, whose love for her son drives her to desperate measures. But while Xenophilius's behavior, however understandable, is morally questionable, Luna's never is. She's inspired lunacy; she's untainted innocence; she's faith and intuition; she's selflessness incarnate. So, yes, she's the opposite of Hermione (except that Hermione, unless you count her attempts at revenge, is also untainted), but she's also, IMO, the polar opposite of Voldemort. 

And, of course, she does a few useful things like Stunning Alecto Carrow, casting a Patronus when Harry can't, showing him what the tiara looks like (all her talk and her father's about the diadem of Ravenclaw having never clicked in Harry's or Hermione's mind), and, near the end of the book, understanding that Harry needs to be alone with Ron and Hermione and distracting everyone with the "Blibbering Humdinger."

Carol, who thinks that the Rotfang Conspiracy may be the funniest moment in all the books




From catlady at wicca.net  Sat May 30 22:45:19 2009
From: catlady at wicca.net (Catlady (Rita Prince Winston))
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 22:45:19 -0000
Subject: Learning Disability / The Nimbus 2000 / The Prophecy
Message-ID: <gvsctv+br4q@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186795

Marianne wildirishrose wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186744>:

<< If Muggle schools have LD kids in their system, I wonder if Hogwarts would allow LD children in? Would there be some kind of magic to tame down ADHD? I can't imagine Hogwarts could/would ever change a personality of a child. Muggle schools couldn't do it. Or would parents keep their child home. Sort of like the Kendra/Ariana situation. >>

The wizarding folk have Cheering Charms and Calming Concoctions, Love Potions and Memory Charms. I'm sure they have other magic to affect the mind, some of which might ease the symptoms of relevant disorders -- maybe something to focus attention, maybe something to be more sedentary, maybe something to sharpen one's hearing... 

The Memory Charms are actually Forgetting Charms (which, along with Confundus, might be actually useful in treating PTSD) and if they have a Remembery Charm or Memorization Potion, no one has thought to use it on Neville. It could be that Hogwarts never thinks to use these things except as directed by parents...

While I personally wouldn't put it past Hogwarts to use Petrificus Totalus, conjured ropes, and a silencing spell to control disruptive students.

Shaun wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186745>:

<< She pushes through the change because he is that good. Yes, she wants him on the team - but she wants him on the team because he's a truly exceptional player. The two things go together. And, yes, she gets him a broom. >>

I remember when the list used to discuss how that broom was provided to Harry, but I don't recall if there was a conclusion. 

The only suggestion that my bad memory recalls being ruled out by more canon is the suggestion that the school provided one broom to each House team player when they were first admitted to the team, the current latest top general production model, explaining why Fred and George got Cleansweep Fives, Cho Chang got a Comet 260, and Harry got a Nimbus 2000; the school supplied only one broom per player, which is why Harry was expected to buy his own replacement when the Nimbus 2000 was smashed into bits, and why Lucius paid for new better brooms for all the Slytherin team. That was ruled out by Molly buying the broom that Ron used on the Gryffindor team.

Other suggestions I recall were that McGonagall bought it because of her passion for Gryffindor Quidditch, Dumbledore bought it because Harry was his special project, Hogwarts bought it via an endowed fund for providing special equipment for orphan students with special talents, or Harry's Gringotts vault bought it. 

The latter raised fascinating questions about how Gringotts knows who is allowed to take money from which vault - is it just whoever has physical possession of the vault key? When we first see Harry's vault key, Hagrid has it. Hagrid must have got it from Dumbledore. Hagrid handed it to Griphook to unlock the vault. Did Griphook hand it back to Hagrid (thus to Dumbledore) or to Harry? 

How did Dumbledore have Harry's vault key? If the vault had been James's and became Harry's by inheritance, maybe James gave the key to Dumbledore because it wasn't much use to James while hiding under Fidelius. However, it could have been a vault established for Harry, to which the contents of James's and Lily's vaults were transferred upon inheritance. In that case, the simplest way that Dumbledore would have the key is that he is the one who established Harry's vault. That would have been very reasonable for him to do if he was executor or administrator of the Potters' estate and/or Harry's guardian. 

The will named Sirius as guardisn and I suppose it also named him as executor, but that was cancelled out by him being in Azkaban. I believe the wizarding world recognized Dumbledore as executor, administrator and guardian because he started acting as such before anyone gave him permission to do so, and they held him in such high esteem. And wizarding folk hold Muggles in such low esteem that they wouldn't recognize a Muggle for those positions unless the Muggle had been appointed in the will, and maybe not even then. I don't know whether the wizarding folk would bother to get some kind of legal paperwork from the Ministry of Magic stating that Dumbledore was Harry's guardian, or they'd just do it without bureaucratic formalities.

Alla wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186793>:

<< Were you initially disappointed when prophecy was introduced? Were you happy how Prophecy played out? >>

By then I knew there was going to be a prophecy and I was eager for the details, but I was terribly disappointed that 'for neither can live while the other survives' doesn't make any sense. It STILL doesn't make any sense: even if it applies only to that there duel, then neither could DIE while the other survived.

As for knowing there was going to be a prophecy, at the end of PS/SS, Harry asked Dumbledore why Voldemort cared so much to kill him in particular, and Dumbledore said there was a reason but refused to tell it to Harry. Us readers know that this is literature, so obviously the reason is that Harry is Voldemort's destined destroyer. Like all those Greek prophecy stories like Oedipus and Perseus (where the prophecy only comes true because of the destined murder victim's attempt to prevent it, which turned out to be the case with Harry, but not predicted, at least not by  me, at the end of PS/SS). 

Dumbledore believed it, too, and in those days I doubted whether Dumbledore was gullible enough to believe in prophecies, so I thought it might be something like Harry had a rare genetic mutation that made him immune to certain curses (Avada Kedavra if we had heard of it before GoF) or that his parents had magically concealed a magic talisman in one of his vertebrae... It could have been that James and Lily were carriers of this rare recessive gene and Dumbledore persuaded them to break up with their respective True Loves and marry each other and keep having babies until one hit the double-recessive jackpot.

But Dumbledore being unable to bring himself to tell Harry the reason strongly suggested to me that the prophecy or mutation or talisman specified that he would have to die to kill Voldemort, something like Holmes and Moriarty falling together off the Reichenbach Falls, and DD didn't want to tell Harry he had to die young and voluntarily. And that is more likely to be a prophecy than a piece of made-up magic genetics. For which 'neither can DIE while the other survives' would be suitable.

And on-list we had so much fun with that Prophecy. Did it say only Harry could kill Voldemort but not only Voldemort could kill Harry, so Voldemort would live forever (horrible thought) if someone or something else killed Harry? 

Why Voldemort offered to spare Lily? A prophecy that Lily Potter's son would win the war for his father's side caused Voldemort to want Lily to bear HIS son. Or why Voldemart was determined to kill Lily AND James AND Harry, and also why Harry had no living Potter relatives: the prophecy that 'the last Potter' would defeat the Dark Lord, so LV tried to kill ALL the Potters, including Lily and her potential unborn child, Harry, James, James's siblings if any, James's parents, maybe James's grandparents and uncles and aunts. (And btw I wanted James's parents to be named Claibourne and Clotho, not Charlus and Dorothea.)

And I don't recall anyone but me liking my favorite theory, that the reason there was Draco and so many other children of Death Eaters in Harry's year was that Voldemort had encountered a different, earlier, prophecy that a child conceived under Scorpio in 1980 (or maybe some other specification of the time) would have great unknown powers to win the war, so LV ordered his Death Eaters to procreate in hope that the child would be born and raised on his team rather than the other team, and share its parents' loyalty and serve LV. Or possibly it was Lucius who received this prophecy and gave that order to only his own cell members.

I had a lot of fun with that, such as, Lucius explaining to the senior Crabbe and Goyle what their Master had just ordered them to do. In American, it's 'He told you to go home and knock up your wives', but can anyone figure out how to say it in British? "Impregnate your wives" is too big a word for Crabbe and Goyle to understand. "Put your wives in the family way' sounds too prissy for that gang. "Put your wives up the spout"? A LOT of fun: in my fanfic, Goyle was already married but Crabbe had to be given the teen-age daughter of another Death Eater...





From wildirishrose at fiber.net  Sat May 30 22:53:47 2009
From: wildirishrose at fiber.net (wildirishrose01us)
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 22:53:47 -0000
Subject: Clothing -  Was Sadism or  not ? McGonagall and her punishments
In-Reply-To: <C507CEA6D07940C5B40671E9C7E5790E@ShaunPC>
Message-ID: <gvsddr+rk2o@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186796

> Shaun:
> 
> I'm aware of the list. I'm also aware of similar lists that exist for real 
> world schools, and such lists do not normally contain a list of all the 
> schools rules relating to uniform and appearance. I have seen exceptions to 
> that, but in general, I would not expect to find such information contained 
> in a list of what students to buy in regards to uniform, and so the fact 
> that Hogwarts list doesn't do that, doesn't in any way suggest that such 
> rules don't exist.
> 
> The uniform list for my old school can be seen at:
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/p4ukj2
> 
> Nowhere in that list is there a list of rules concerning appearance - 
> because that's not something that needs to be sent home with a list of 
> things you need to buy for school, which is what the list Hogwarts sends is.


Marianne:

I just looked at the link. Dear God.  It's not cheap to buy school uniforms.  It is clothes for boarding school, isn't it?  If WW clothing is as expensive as boarding school clothing, no wonder the Weasley children wore second hand robes.

Question I've wanted to ask for a while, and maybe it's been discussed before.  Why is it in the WW it seems the families are small - 1 maybe 2 children.  With the exception of the Weasleys.  With WW families that small no wonder the pureblood status would be hard to carry on.  Ok.  Back to school uniforms.

I've heard good and bad about school uniforms.  Good is that the parents don't have to worry about sending their kid to school in the latest fashions.  Bad in that parents complain that they have to buy two sets of clothes.  One for school and the other for everyday/play wear.  I see the kids that go to private/charter schools come into Wal-Mart nearly every night.  It seems every kid wears light brown pants or skirts and red or blue shirts.  The hair styles are what every other kid would wear.

My son teaches Jr. high, public school.  He says the hairstyles aren't that big of a deal.  They wear their hair "shaggy" as he puts it, but there isn't anyone wearing red, green, orange, purple, blue hair.  That he's seen anyway.  The only violation of dress code is that the weather is getting warmer and the girls are wearing their shorts too short.  The kids are always trying to dress older, but to me the kids are starting to look younger and younger or I must be getting old.  I'm carding men/women for beer that look 16 and in reality they are 23 years or older.

Marianne




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Sat May 30 23:49:46 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 23:49:46 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gvko5t+231a@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvsgmq+83su@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186797

> > >>Montavilla47:
> > It's not like you have to chose between Ron and Draco... <snip> 
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Exactly!  And your tying Harry-Ron-Draco with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"'s Buffy-Willow-Cordelia is dead on, I think.  As a viewer I could never have chosen between Willow and Cordelia, and I'm glad I didn't have to. :)
> 
Pippin:
The thing is, it wasn't Harry's idea or even Ron's that Harry had to choose between Ron and Draco. Ron was clueless about the Weasley/Malfoy feud at that point (his brothers will tell him about it in Book 2). It's Draco who says  that some wizard families are the wrong sort and if Harry wants to be friends with him he'll  avoid the Weasleys, who have red hair and more children than they can afford. So he's not talking "blood traitors" either at this point. AFAWK, it's the Weasley looks and their style that Draco finds unbecoming.

 Harry and Ron will eventually learn a lesson about choosing friends who are "cool." But it's Draco who wanted to be friends with Harry Potter because that would be cool -- he wasn't so friendly to the boy he met in Madam Malkin's shop, when he  didn't sound sorry that Harry's  parents were dead and made it clear that people from Muggle families were the wrong sort. 

I agree that Draco is not just an arrogant bully. That's the lesson that Harry had to learn about him, that he, Harry, can sympathize with a bully and feel the same need to save him that he feels about people he likes better. And that every life is worth saving because to someone that life is precious.

   But Harry didn't learn anything that could stop Draco from being a bully, because that was Draco's choice, not his. Draco did discover  that if you're not the biggest bully on the playground, bullying may not pay, especially if the biggest bully isn't into sharing. And he learned that he  doesn't have what it takes to be the biggest bully. But he'd still like to have it, and that, IMO, is what makes him non-sympatico with Harry. 

I think the books make it very clear that it would be impossible to be Harry's friend and not be Ron's or Hermione's, and I can't recall even a theory that Draco has a secret desire to befriend Ron - please point me at it if it exists. At any rate, Lucius and Narcissa would not have been best pleased. 

 And once we understand how close Draco is to Lucius and Narcissa, it really doesn't make sense that he would reject their beliefs and values. So Draco too learned there were more important things than coolness. :) Draco's a loyal son, and paradoxically, that's one of the reasons Harry becomes sympathetic to him. 


> > >>Pippin:
> > Telling on Hagrid wouldn't get Harry in trouble. Draco had to catch Harry without any adults to take the blame instead. But he was a little too late, and McGonagall didn't believe there was a dragon at all.
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Why not tell Snape (a friendly ear as far as Draco knew) either when he saw the Trio heading down to Hagrid's cottage, or when he knew they were moving the dragon?  Why sneak out at night and try and capture them himself?  

Pippin:
I don't think he was trying to capture them himself. I think he meant for  Filch to catch them but wanted to witness Harry's downfall, and figured he had a better chance of accomplishing that without Snape involved. But my memory is hazy and I haven't got my books so I could be wrong. 

Betsy_Hp:
 Draco was *way* too vulnerable to play 'bully' well.)

Pippin:
I agree, except I think his vulnerability is intentional, and Harry eventually responds to it. Who says bullies can't be vulnerable? I don't think we're supposed to hate Draco at the end, I think we're supposed to feel a bit sorry for him, and sorry for Scorpius, and to hope that eventually there might be Malfoys who wouldn't disown their kids for marrying a Weasley or a Muggleborn. But there's nothing Harry can do to make that happen. 

In the first book we're told that facing the mountain troll together made the Trio friends, but we also hear about Snape, who could never forgive James for saving him. So it's apparent  from the beginning that not everyone's mind works the same way.

Pippin




From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Sun May 31 00:19:56 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 00:19:56 -0000
Subject: Prophecies and Chosen Ones
In-Reply-To: <gvrh5d+kkbb@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvsifc+tmfk@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186798

> Alla:
> But I cannot help but think that Rick Riordan did way better job with the Prophecy by introducing excellent excellent twist at the end. Because seriously, I do know that Prophecy is a widespread device of the genre, but with all the talk of subverting it, transforming it, with the use of this plot device I quite honestly saw nothing of the sort.
> 
>  Were you initially disappointed when prophecy was introduced? Were you happy how Prophecy played out?

Zara:
I cannot address how Riordan used a prophecy as I have not read his series. But Rowling did try to fool us and throw in a twist. Did you know Harry was not going to die? The Prophecy, after all, does not state that Harry is the one who WILL defeat Voldemort, just that he has the power to do so. Perhaps it was by letting Voldemort kill him, his Zfinal Horcrux. ;-)

It did not fool me, but I did not worry much about the Prophecy and it was not the source of my certainty. 




From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Sun May 31 05:10:58 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 05:10:58 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gvsgmq+83su@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvt3h2+d4hi@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186799

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
>
> > > >>Montavilla47:
> > > It's not like you have to chose between Ron and Draco... <snip> 
> > 
> > Betsy Hp:
> > Exactly!  And your tying Harry-Ron-Draco with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"'s Buffy-Willow-Cordelia is dead on, I think.  As a viewer I could never have chosen between Willow and Cordelia, and I'm glad I didn't have to. :)
> > 
> Pippin:
> The thing is, it wasn't Harry's idea or even Ron's that Harry had to choose between Ron and Draco. 

Montavllla47:
Right.  My point was, whether it was Harry (who did choose), or Draco (who 
insisted that Harry choose), the *reader* isn't obligated to choose.  Nor, 
according to the "opposites attract" trope that such an inauspicious beginning 
between Harry and Draco signals, is it necessary for Harry to accept Draco on 
Draco's terms.  

In other words, it wasn't impossible for Harry to become friends with Draco, 
but it would have required that Draco modify his values to include respecting
Ron and Hermione--even if he wasn't cordial to them.

Pippin:
Ron was clueless about the Weasley/Malfoy feud at that point (his brothers will tell him about it in Book 2). It's Draco who says  that some wizard families are the wrong sort and if Harry wants to be friends with him he'll  avoid the Weasleys, who have red hair and more children than they can afford. So he's not talking "blood traitors" either at this point. AFAWK, it's the Weasley looks and their style that Draco finds unbecoming.

Montavilla47:
To me, it seemed as though Draco was parroting his parents' beliefs about
the Weasleys.  He had no way of knowing, unless he had heard about it
from *someone* that the Weasleys had "too many children."

So, it's not exactly Draco who finds the Weasleys unbecoming, but Draco
trumpeting the classist views of his father.  And those views could have
been changed--unless children's minds and souls really are set in stone 
at eleven.  

Pippin:
>  Harry and Ron will eventually learn a lesson about choosing friends who are "cool." But it's Draco who wanted to be friends with Harry Potter because that would be cool -- he wasn't so friendly to the boy he met in Madam Malkin's shop, when he  didn't sound sorry that Harry's  parents were dead and made it clear that people from Muggle families were the wrong sort. 
>

Montavilla47:
I don't recall Draco saying that people from Muggle families were the 
wrong sort.  I recall him saying he'd heard Hagrid periodically got drunk
and set his hut on fire, and that he'd leave school rather than be sorted
into Hufflepuff.  

He may not have sounded sorry about Harry's parents being dead, but
that doesn't mean he wasn't trying to be friendly to a random, scrawny, 
specky kid.  After all, it was Draco who started the conversation in the 
first place.  

As for Ron and Harry eventually learning to befriend the "uncool" (Luna
and Neville), I think that was a lesson Draco didn't need to learn.  You'd
be hard pressed to find two less cool friends than Crabbe or Goyle.  And
Draco's girlfriend, Pansy, is described as a pug-nosed cow.  Of all the 
fellow Slytherins in Draco's year, only Blaise Zabini seems to have any
kind of "cool."

Pippin:
> I agree that Draco is not just an arrogant bully. That's the lesson that Harry had to learn about him, that he, Harry, can sympathize with a bully and feel the same need to save him that he feels about people he likes better. And that every life is worth saving because to someone that life is precious.

Montavilla47:
I agree.  The ultimate lesson about Draco seems that, while annoying 
and potentially murderous, he's not bad enough to kill or be left to 
burn to death.

Pippin;
>    But Harry didn't learn anything that could stop Draco from being a bully, because that was Draco's choice, not his. Draco did discover  that if you're not the biggest bully on the playground, bullying may not pay, especially if the biggest bully isn't into sharing. And he learned that he  doesn't have what it takes to be the biggest bully. But he'd still like to have it, and that, IMO, is what makes him non-sympatico with Harry. 

Montavilla47:
Who is the biggest bully in this scene?  Voldemort?  Because, while I 
agree that Draco would have gladly been the biggest bully up to end of
HBP, I don't see any indication that he wanted it after the scene with 
Dumbledore on the tower.  

All he seems to want after that, with the exception that ambiguous 
scene in the RoR, is to be left alone.

Pippin:
> I think the books make it very clear that it would be impossible to be Harry's friend and not be Ron's or Hermione's, and I can't recall even a theory that Draco has a secret desire to befriend Ron - please point me at it if it exists. At any rate, Lucius and Narcissa would not have been best pleased. 

Montavilla47:
I agree with you about the Trio being a package deal (from mid-PS/SS onwards
--Draco might have been able to befriend just Ron and Harry before the Troll
incident).  

But... Draco did visit Ron in the hospital wing after Ron was bitten by the 
dragon.  He ended up nicking the letter from Charlie, but there's no way
that he could have known it was there when he went.  And, that moment
does show that Ron and Draco could hold a civil conversation.

Pippin:
>  And once we understand how close Draco is to Lucius and Narcissa, it really doesn't make sense that he would reject their beliefs and values. So Draco too learned there were more important things than coolness. :) Draco's a loyal son, and paradoxically, that's one of the reasons Harry becomes sympathetic to him. 

Montavilla47:
I think that depends.  Plenty of people in real life are close to their
parents and yet end up rejecting at least some of their values.  That's
pretty much a natural process.

I mean, Bill probably loves his parents, but he still wears his hair long
--rejecting Molly's values regarding hair length.  He also marries a 
girl she disapproves of.  

Now, was Draco going to do all this rejecting right after getting to 
Hogwarts?  Of course not.  But he had seven years to change his views.
And, they could have changed at any time and for any number of 
reasons.

> Betsy_Hp:
>  Draco was *way* too vulnerable to play 'bully' well.)
> 
> Pippin:
> I agree, except I think his vulnerability is intentional, and Harry eventually responds to it. Who says bullies can't be vulnerable? I don't think we're supposed to hate Draco at the end, I think we're supposed to feel a bit sorry for him, and sorry for Scorpius, and to hope that eventually there might be Malfoys who wouldn't disown their kids for marrying a Weasley or a Muggleborn. But there's nothing Harry can do to make that happen. 
> 
> In the first book we're told that facing the mountain troll together made the Trio friends, but we also hear about Snape, who could never forgive James for saving him. So it's apparent  from the beginning that not everyone's mind works the same way.
> 

Montavilla47:
That's an interesting connection to make.  I never once connected the Troll
incident to the James/Snape relationship.  Probably because we didn't know
anything about the situation where James saved Snape.  From the beginning,
it sounded like something that happened later in their school days--and the
clear parallel was drawn by Dumbledore between James/Snape and 
Draco/Harry.  

Which, when you think about it, practically screams foreshadowing for Harry
or Draco to save the other--so that we can the new generation creating 
a happier outcome.

Which is what happens--Harry does save Draco from the fiendfyre, and,
although they never become friends, Draco doesn't seem to be holding
a grudge about it.  




From montavilla47 at yahoo.com  Sun May 31 05:20:53 2009
From: montavilla47 at yahoo.com (montavilla47)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 05:20:53 -0000
Subject: Prophecies and Chosen Ones
In-Reply-To: <gvsifc+tmfk@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvt43l+fqrt@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186800

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Zara" <zgirnius at ...> wrote:
>
> > Alla:
> > But I cannot help but think that Rick Riordan did way better job with the Prophecy by introducing excellent excellent twist at the end. Because seriously, I do know that Prophecy is a widespread device of the genre, but with all the talk of subverting it, transforming it, with the use of this plot device I quite honestly saw nothing of the sort.
> > 
> >  Were you initially disappointed when prophecy was introduced? Were you happy how Prophecy played out?
> 
> Zara:
> I cannot address how Riordan used a prophecy as I have not read his series. But Rowling did try to fool us and throw in a twist. Did you know Harry was not going to die? The Prophecy, after all, does not state that Harry is the one who WILL defeat Voldemort, just that he has the power to do so. Perhaps it was by letting Voldemort kill him, his Zfinal Horcrux. ;-)
> 
> It did not fool me, but I did not worry much about the Prophecy and it was not the source of my certainty.

Montavilla47:

The whole fun of having a prophecy in a story is having it come true in an
unexpected way.  For example, the prophecies about Macbeth promised that
he was safe until Birnum Wood came to Dunsinane (I apologize if I'm 
misspelling any of that), and that "none of woman born" could harm him.

Of course, we get the wood coming to Dunsinane in an entirely unexpected
way, and we have Macduff's story of being "untimely ripped" from his 
mother's womb.

And then there's Oedipus, whose parents try to kill him to avoid his
prophecy, only to create the conditions for the prediction to come true.

I would have liked to have an explanation for the prophecy--because
it only works if you use the word "live" to mean "live a full, happy life."
And it only works for Harry, because Harry's the one who has to get 
rid of Voldemort before he can start enjoying things like snogging.  

Except for getting paged all the time by his Death Eaters, Voldemort's
existence post-GoF would have been much the same whether or not
Harry was alive.  He was having a high time killing people and taking 
over the world.






From foxmoth at qnet.com  Sun May 31 14:45:23 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 14:45:23 -0000
Subject: Prophecies and Chosen Ones
In-Reply-To: <gvt43l+fqrt@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvu563+u99f@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186801

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "montavilla47" <montavilla47 at ...> wrote:

> 
> I would have liked to have an explanation for the prophecy--because
> it only works if you use the word "live" to mean "live a full, happy life."
> And it only works for Harry, because Harry's the one who has to get 
> rid of Voldemort before he can start enjoying things like snogging.  
> 
> Except for getting paged all the time by his Death Eaters, Voldemort's existence post-GoF would have been much the same whether or not Harry was alive.  He was having a high time killing people and taking  over the world.


Pippin:
The thing is, in the Potterverse, living means dying at the appropriate time, which  Harry cannot do once Voldemort has taken his blood,  and Voldemort cannot do because of the horcruxes. Fudge says that according to Dumbledore, Voldemort can't really be alive if he can't die. 

People seem to think this is too tricky or perhaps too sentimental about death, but I really think this is what JKR expects us to grasp, and to hope, if not to believe: that death at the right time is not a catastrophe but a friend to be welcomed and expected, and only a temporary separation from those we love. Sorry to be sticky, but that's what I get from canon. 

It's interesting to speculate about how Dumbledore would have gone about destroying the horcruxes if Harry hadn't survived. But Neville's emergence as a leader and successor to Harry perhaps gives us a clue. Anyway, Neville was not  on the path to leading  a full happy life with  Voldemort in charge, so I don't see how the prophecy only would hold true for Harry. 

Pippin







From bboyminn at yahoo.com  Sun May 31 14:46:30 2009
From: bboyminn at yahoo.com (Steve)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 14:46:30 -0000
Subject: Why didn't DD reveal Voldemort's identity?
In-Reply-To: <gvigbq+59ul@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvu586+mqqm@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186802

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> Alla wrote:
> > <snip>
> >I do wonder why exactly Dumbledore did not scream at the top of his lungs the truth of who Tom Riddle really was. I am wondering if Dumbledore was so deep into his secrets that he thought that this will be something the world better not know, just as when he did not share his suspicions about Tom with anybody while he was still in school.
> > <snip>
> 
> Carol responds:
> 
> I think you must be right that Dumbledore thought that this information was something that the WW would be better off not knowing or he would have publicized it. The only reason I can think of is one that others have already mentioned, that it would interfere with his investigations.
> 
> ...

bboyminn:

I don't necessarily disagree with your analysis, but I will
point out that Dumbledore may have indeed revealed details of
Voldemort's past, just not to the world at large. But 
Dumbledore does seem to communicate with people at the Ministry,
if not the Minister himself. But they don't seem very eager
to hear what Dumbledore has to say. 

Like so much in government, they are not quick to reveal the
truth about anything. 

Now, exactly who at the Ministry Dumbledore told is uncertain,
but, as I said, he didn't keep in an absolute secret, but he
didn't go shouting it about either. That would have as we
seem to agree, have put a crimp in his plans and his research.

The only point I'm making is that just because we don't see
Dumbledore tell anyone, and just because the public in general
don't seem to know or want to know, doesn't mean Dumbledore
hasn't tried to tell key people the truth of the matter. Or at
least parts of the truth of the matter. 

So, just because we don't see it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

On a similar but unrelated note, and something that makes me
laugh when I think about it, is Harry showing Scrimgeour the
scar on the back of his hand. Do we actually know that 
Scrimgeour knows about Umbridge's 'cutting quill' and how and
on whom she used it at school? 

If not, then Scrimgeour must be puzzled as to why Harry is 
always shaking his fist at him. I think we are meant to think
that Scrimgeour understands the gesture, but we don't know
that he does because the story never tells us so. So, 
every time Harry shakes his fist at Scrimgeour I laugh 
thinking that Scrimgeour can't figure out why, or can't 
understand the significants of it.

Again, I'm just re-emphasizing the point that just because we
didn't hear about it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Steve/bboyminn




From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sun May 31 15:09:24 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 15:09:24 -0000
Subject: Prophecies and Chosen Ones
In-Reply-To: <gvsifc+tmfk@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvu6j4+2tbu@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186803

Zara:
I cannot address how Riordan used a prophecy as I have not read his series. But
Rowling did try to fool us and throw in a twist. Did you know Harry was not
going to die? The Prophecy, after all, does not state that Harry is the one who
WILL defeat Voldemort, just that he has the power to do so. Perhaps it was by
letting Voldemort kill him, his Zfinal Horcrux. ;-)

It did not fool me, but I did not worry much about the Prophecy and it was not
the source of my certainty.

Alla:

No, of course I was not sure that Harry was not going to die, as I mentioned before this was one of the most burning questions for me at the end. But this was to be the one regardless of whether prophecy was introduced or not, you know? So I guess I cannot really consider it a prophecy twist.  I mean, Voldemort was trying to kill Harry several times, so I would have been nervous if he can make it anyway.


Pippin:
The thing is, in the Potterverse, living means dying at the appropriate time,
which Harry cannot do once Voldemort has taken his blood, and Voldemort cannot
do because of the horcruxes. Fudge says that according to Dumbledore, Voldemort
can't really be alive if he can't die.

People seem to think this is too tricky or perhaps too sentimental about death,
but I really think this is what JKR expects us to grasp, and to hope, if not to
believe: that death at the right time is not a catastrophe but a friend to be
welcomed and expected, and only a temporary separation from those we love. Sorry
to be sticky, but that's what I get from canon. <SNIP>


Alla:

Eh, sure, I do agree with you that this turned to be a major theme in canon, what you said about death in the appropriate time being not a catastrophe, but a friend to be welcome and expected, etc, etc.

But people were talking that neither can live while the other survives makes no sense to them and I do agree with Montavilla that it does not work as to Voldemort to me either.

You seem to be saying that the wording of the prophecy is some sort of code, where "neither can live" actually means "neither can die"?

If that's what you mean and I do agree that this way it works well enough, then I am sorry, but to me it is cheating. To me Prophecy must make sense at the end **exactly as it is written**, no matter how ambiguous it was when we just read it, you know? I do not know why the heck author would expect me to put the opposite word in there and say AHA, now it makes sense.

Did I misunderstand your argument Pippin?

Alla




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Sun May 31 15:55:50 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 15:55:50 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gvt3h2+d4hi@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvu9a6+srue@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186804

 
> Montavllla47:
> Right.  My point was, whether it was Harry (who did choose), or Draco (who  insisted that Harry choose), the *reader* isn't obligated to choose.  <snip> 
> 
> In other words, it wasn't impossible for Harry to become friends with Draco,  but it would have required that Draco modify his values to include respecting Ron and Hermione--even if he wasn't cordial to them.
> 

Pippin:
Right. But the reader is supposed to respect Ron and Hermione, and should feel that Draco needs to modify his values before he can be a worthy friend. 

> 
> Montavilla47:

> So, it's not exactly Draco who finds the Weasleys unbecoming, but Draco trumpeting the classist views of his father.  And those views could have been changed--unless children's minds and souls really are set in stone  at eleven.  

Pippin:
Yes, they could have been changed. But Draco doesn't *want* to change,  and canon shows us why: because it would mean turning completely against his family, whom he loves.

> 
> Montavilla47:
> I don't recall Draco saying that people from Muggle families were the  wrong sort. 

Pippin:
Still don't have my book, but I'm pretty sure that Draco asks whether Harry's parents are "our kind", meaning a witch and wizard, and says that the other sort shouldn't be let in (to Hogwarts), because they don't know our ways. He asks Harry what his surname is, and at that point they're interrupted. Harry is deeply upset, though to be fair, Draco is back to back with him and can't see the effect his words are having. 

But yes, Draco is interested in making friends, but only with certain people. He, unlike Sirius, does not think it would be cool to break family traditions.

Montavilla:
> As for Ron and Harry eventually learning to befriend the "uncool" (Luna and Neville), I think that was a lesson Draco didn't need to learn.  You'd be hard pressed to find two less cool friends than Crabbe or Goyle.  AndDraco's girlfriend, Pansy, is described as a pug-nosed cow.  

Pippin:
We're seeing Crabbe, Goyle and Pansy through Harry's prejudiced eyes. Draco may think they're cool. Pansy at any rate seems to be the leader of her  gang of Slytherin girls, and Crabbe and Goyle are big, strong, and, who knew?, magically powerful. Swots they're not, but then being swotty isn't cool, either.
 
> Montavilla47:
> I agree.  The ultimate lesson about Draco seems that, while annoying  and potentially murderous, he's not bad enough to kill or be left to  burn to death.

Pippin:
So, what's wrong with that as a lesson? Many, many people have been killed or left to die because they were annoying and potentially murderous, and held to views which in the eyes of decent people  were dangerous, self-defeating and obviously wrong.  

> 
> Montavilla47:
> Who is the biggest bully in this scene?  Voldemort?  Because, while I  agree that Draco would have gladly been the biggest bully up to end of HBP, I don't see any indication that he wanted it after the scene with  Dumbledore on the tower.  
> 
> All he seems to want after that, with the exception that ambiguous 
> scene in the RoR, is to be left alone.

Pippin:
But Draco knew that being left alone was not an option. He's just not that independent. He changed sides  when his parents did, and not before.  

You don't think that naming a kid "Scorpius" is an indication that the parent has some issues?  I know it's a constellation name, but there are lots of constellations that aren't poisonous vermin.


> 
> Pippin:
> > I think the books make it very clear that it would be impossible to be Harry's friend and not be Ron's or Hermione's, and I can't recall even a theory that Draco has a secret desire to befriend Ron - please point me at it if it exists. At any rate, Lucius and Narcissa would not have been best pleased. 
> 
> Montavilla47:
  
> 
> But... Draco did visit Ron in the hospital wing after Ron was bitten by the dragon.  He ended up nicking the letter from Charlie, but there's no way that he could have known it was there when he went.  And, that moment does show that Ron and Draco could hold a civil conversation.

Pippin:
Good catch, but surely Draco went because he was hoping to pick up some information about the dragon, which he did. 

> 
> Montavilla47:
> I think that depends.  Plenty of people in real life are close to their parents and yet end up rejecting at least some of their values.  That's pretty much a natural process.
> 
> I mean, Bill probably loves his parents, but he still wears his hair long --rejecting Molly's values regarding hair length.  He also marries a  girl she disapproves of.  

Pippin:
Molly's disapproval didn't extend to  risking jail time to put someone in power who won't allow people to grow their hair or marry people she disapproves of. But she did risk jail time to oppose the Ministry, and we saw how the Weasleys treated the son who defied them on that. I don't think Draco would want to be estranged from his father or have to send back his mother's presents in order not to compromise himself with his new friends. 

Draco could have changed his views, but he'd have had to pay the same price as Percy, Sirius and Andromeda. But why would he even consider changing them, when his relationship with his parents means so much to him? He might challenge them on minor stuff but on the big issues he's Lucius and Narcissa's man. 


Pippin




From foxmoth at qnet.com  Sun May 31 16:30:05 2009
From: foxmoth at qnet.com (pippin_999)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 16:30:05 -0000
Subject: Why didn't DD reveal Voldemort's identity?
In-Reply-To: <gvu586+mqqm@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvubad+9vtt@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186805


> bboyminn:
> 
> I don't necessarily disagree with your analysis, but I will
> point out that Dumbledore may have indeed revealed details of
> Voldemort's past, just not to the world at large. But 
> Dumbledore does seem to communicate with people at the Ministry,
> if not the Minister himself. But they don't seem very eager
> to hear what Dumbledore has to say. 

Pippin:
Perhaps Dumbledore was afraid of what Voldemort would do to the people who had known him as Riddle if it looked like his efforts to leave that name behind were going to fail. It would be just like Tom to decide to kill every one of them. When Harry uses the name in public, Voldemort has already promised to kill everyone within hearing.

Or it could be that Dumbledore feared that the Ministry wouldn't think a halfblood killing other halfbloods and muggleborns was  their problem, as long as the statute of secrecy wasn't breached. 

After all, the WW isn't about to stop the Giants from killing each other, and if Fenrir had decided to kill all the other werewolves, he'd probably have gotten an OM, first class. When he's speaking to the Ministry, DD doesn't indicate that  Muggleborns are in special danger, does he?

I believe JKR said that Voldemort's ancestry is based on the idea that Hitler had Jewish ancestry. There was some attempt to use that against Hitler, but I think not so much by the allies as by other Nazis. (The evidence seems to be much shakier than in Voldemort's case.) I suppose LV would make short work of any DE's who tried to blackmail or discredit him in that way, and perhaps Dumbledore took warning by that.  

JKR does rather finesse the issue of how Voldemort went about becoming known by a name he didn't allow people to say...perhaps at first he allowed it to be written? 

Pippin





From terrianking at aol.com  Sun May 31 16:41:35 2009
From: terrianking at aol.com (terrianking at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 12:41:35 EDT
Subject: Draco and Intent: WAS:  Re: Snape and Harry
Message-ID: <d0a.4dd89fcd.37540d3f@aol.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186806


>  Montavilla47:

> 
> But... Draco did visit Ron in the hospital  wing after Ron was bitten by 
the dragon. He ended up nicking the letter from  Charlie, but there's no way 
that he could have known it was there when he  went. And, that moment does 
show that Ron and Draco could hold a civil  conversation.

Pippin:
Good catch, but surely Draco went because he  was hoping to pick up some 
information about the dragon, which he did.  


Robert of lurkerville: 11:45 am

>From the novel:
 
"Harry and Hermione rushed up to the hospital wing at the end of the  day
to find Ron in a terrible state in bed.
"It's not just my hand," he  whispered, "although that feels like it's
about to fall off. Malfoy told  Madam Pomfrey he wanted to borrow one of
my books so he could come and have a  good laugh at me. He kept
threatening to tell her what really bit me -- I've  told her it was a
dog, but I don't think she believes me -I shouldn't have  hit him at the
Quidditch match, that's why he's doing this."
Harry and  Hermione tried to calm Ron down."
 

Call me dense but I don't see how this proves Ron and Malfoy could hold a  
civil conversation, nor how it is an example of the two possibly forming a  
friendship. Kicking someone when they are down isn't my idea of a 
misunderstood  boy trying to be nice. It's a boy getting even while the other can't 
fight  back.
Note this agitation is before he realizes Malfoy has Charlie's  note. 
Malfoy was not there to comfort him.



From HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com  Sun May 31 16:57:59 2009
From: HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com (HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com)
Date: 31 May 2009 16:57:59 -0000
Subject: Weekly Chat, 5/31/2009, 1:00 pm 
Message-ID: <1243789079.9.71492.m3@yahoogroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186807

Reminder from: HPforGrownups Yahoo! Group
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From zgirnius at yahoo.com  Sun May 31 17:02:14 2009
From: zgirnius at yahoo.com (Zara)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 17:02:14 -0000
Subject: Prophecies and Chosen Ones
In-Reply-To: <gvt43l+fqrt@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvud6m+35eg@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186808

> Montavilla47:
> 
> I would have liked to have an explanation for the prophecy--because
> it only works if you use the word "live" to mean "live a full, happy life."

Zara:
There is a sense in which the Prophecy is true of Voldemort as well. This sense of "live" is explicitly mentioned in the text.

I do not have by books (packing for a big move), but, paraphrasing...

In HBP, "The Other Minister", the PM upon being told by Fudge that He Who Must Not Be Named is back, asks something like "You mean he's alive?", and Fudge responds with something like "If someone who cannot be killed can be said to be alive."




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sun May 31 18:37:44 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 18:37:44 -0000
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Draco_and_Intent:_Re:_Snape_and_Harry=92s_Sadism__(was:_Lack_of_re-examination)?=
In-Reply-To: <gvt3h2+d4hi@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvuipo+pesh@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186809

Montavllla47 wrote:
<snip>
> I never once connected the Troll incident to the James/Snape relationship.  Probably because we didn't know anything about the situation where James saved Snape.  From the beginning, it sounded like something that happened later in their school days--and the clear parallel was drawn by Dumbledore between James/Snape and Draco/Harry.  
> 
> Which, when you think about it, practically screams foreshadowing for Harry or Draco to save the other--so that we can the new generation creating a happier outcome.
> 
> Which is what happens--Harry does save Draco from the fiendfyre, and, although they never become friends, Draco doesn't seem to be holding a grudge about it.

Carol responds:
I don't see a connection between Harry and Ron's saving Hermione and James's saving Severus, chiefly because one happened in first year to a girl who apparently already wanted to be friends with Ron and Harry and the other to a teenage boy saved by his enemy. Had *James* held Harry's view that you can't face a mountain troll/werewolf together without becoming friends, perhaps matters would be different, but, of course, as an Animagus, he had the upper hand. (The only thing I can figure out is that he must have Stunned Severus from behind before transforming since even the adult Snape didn't know that any of the four were Animagi.) At any rate, James, who had apparently saved Severus for exactly the reason that Snape says later, to keep himself and his friends out of trouble, thought nothing of sneaking up on Severus two against one only a week later. Severus had little reason to be grateful to a rescuer like that, much less to desire to befriend him. As for James, he hadn't changed his opinion of Severus; unlike Harry in his rescue of Hermione, his reasons had nothing to do with Severus's worth as a human being or concern for his safety or his life. It was all about himself and his friends.

Harry's rescue of Draco is also different from James's rescue of Severus. He didn't care at that moment who Draco was, he simply didn't want him or Goyle to die. And he understood Draco better than James understood Severus; he had seen him fail to kill Dumbledore and had felt a touch of pity for him; he had himself nearly killed Draco through his foolish use of an unknown spell labeled "for enemies" the previous year and knew that he didn't want him dead; and now he sees the wandless, helpless Draco cradling his unconscious friend in his arms (a revelation in itself--Draco actually cares about Goyle and even "C-Crabbe," who has nearly killed them all). We see Harry's moral superiority to Ron (and I like Ron, so it pains me to say it), who only reluctantly rescues Goyle when Harry can't hold both him and Draco. (At least Ron does say later that he would have been sorry that Crabbe had died if he hadn't tried to kill them all.)

Draco has the grace to acknowledge Harry with a nod rather than remaining his enemy, but, then, Harry has saved the whole WW from Voldemort. It's very different from James, whose next act after saving Severus for wholly selfish reasons is to publicly humiliate him.

I think that the contrast is not so much between Draco and Severus (or Hermione), the rescued victims, as between Harry and James, the rescuers, one an arrogant toerag who eventually developed more noble qualities and the other a humanitarian hero who can pity even an enemy.

Carol, noting that both Harry and Ron had tried vainly to rescue Wormtail from the strangling grip of his silver hand, in contrast to Lupin and Black, who would have killed him had Harry not stopped them




From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sun May 31 19:19:23 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 19:19:23 -0000
Subject: Scrimgeour and Harry's hand (Was: Why didn't DD reveal Voldemort's identity?)
In-Reply-To: <gvu586+mqqm@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvul7r+uefi@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186810

Steve bboyminn wrote:
> On a similar but unrelated note, and something that makes me laugh when I think about it, is Harry showing Scrimgeour the scar on the back of his hand. Do we actually know that Scrimgeour knows about Umbridge's 'cutting quill' and how and on whom she used it at school? 
> 
> If not, then Scrimgeour must be puzzled as to why Harry is always shaking his fist at him. I think we are meant to think that Scrimgeour understands the gesture, but we don't know that he does because the story never tells us so. So, every time Harry shakes his fist at Scrimgeour I laugh thinking that Scrimgeour can't figure out why, or can't understand the significants of it.
><snip>

Carol responds:

That's what I think, too. How could Scrimgeour possibly know why Harry is raising his fist to him? It looks like a gesture of defiance and it certainly is connected to his retaining Delores Umbridge at the Ministry, but how can Scrimgeour possibly know about Umbridge's horrible quill or understand that Harry was forced to write "I must not tell lies" in his own blood? Now if Harry had held up his fist and said, "See these words carved in my hand? Umbridge did that to me!" Scrimgeour might have examined them and asked questions. But Harry refuses to tell McGonagall, and Dumbledore is avoiding contact with Harry, so the only people who know about the punishment (other than Lee Jordan, who suffered a similar if less prolonged detention) are Hermione and Ron, neither of whom is likely to inform Scrimgeour even if DD or McGonagall would have done so. And certainly Umbridge, who turned Fudge's photograph upside down so it wouldn't witness her (intended) Crucio of Harry ("what Cornelius doesn't know whouldn't hurt him) is certainly not going to tell Fudge's successor that she has tortured the boy now widely regarded as the Chosen One for telling "lies" that turned out to be true.

Obviously, Scrimgeour would know that Umbridge had been the Ministry-appointed DADA teacher, that she had risen to become High Inquisitor and imposed a good many decrees on Hogwarts, and that she had eventually usurped DD's place as headmaster. He might know that she had "run afoul of {Hogwarts'] Centaur herd. But not being a fan of Dumbledore's and being himself suspicious of DD's activities outside the school, he would not have considered all that an adequate reason for dismissing a high-ranking Ministry official who had only (he thinks) been carrying out Ministry policy at the time. (I have my own theories about Umbridge--I think she influenced Fudge rather than the other way around--but that's irrelevant here.)

At any rate, I think that Scrimgeour must be mystified by Harry's gesture of defiance, seeing it primarily as the result of a thorough brain-washing by Dumbledore. Scrimgeour has his faults, certainly, but I don't think he would have retained Umbridge as a Ministry employee if he'd known how thoroughly unscrupulous and sadistic she really was. Nor can he possibly have anticipated that she would become the head of the as-yet-nonexistent Muggle-born Registration Commission after his own murder by the Death Eaters.

I don't find it amusing, but otherwise I agree with you. It's an ironic misunderstanding between two people who are both enemies of Voldemort. Unfortunately, Harry comes to respect Scrimgeour only after Scrimgeour is dead.

Obviously, JKR can't have Harry and Scrimgeour working together for her plot to work, but I don't think that the mutual misunderstanding is just a plot device. I think it's part of an ongoing motif first suggested by Dumbledore at the end of GoF, something about "His power of sowing discord is very great" and the enemies of Voldemort must be united or they will fall. (That motif doesn't work out as well as I would have liked--it looks as if the Ministry will be almost completely restaffed after Kingsley takes charge--though Percy seems not to have resigned after since he's still talking about broomstick regulations at the end of the book.)

Anyway, I see parallels between Scrimgeour and Snape. Harry misunderstands both of them, failing to see that they're on the same side that he is and judging them both on the basis of what seems like ironclad evidence but isn't, and sees their true worth only when they're dead. The raised fist is only one of many ironic misunderstandings or miscommunications throughout the book. Possibly, DD's failure to cooperate with Scrimgeour is another. We can only wonder what would have happened if the Ministry and Dumbledore had not so profoundly mistrusted each other and if Dolores Umbridge had never entered the picture.

Carol, wishing that Scrimgeour had lived up to his potential as a tough and able Minister for Magic






From justcarol67 at yahoo.com  Sun May 31 21:52:13 2009
From: justcarol67 at yahoo.com (Carol)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 21:52:13 -0000
Subject: Prophecies and Chosen Ones
In-Reply-To: <gvt43l+fqrt@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvuu6d+rbf@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186811

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "montavilla47" <montavilla47 at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Zara" <zgirnius@> wrote:
> >
> > > Alla:
Zara wrote:
> > <snip> But Rowling did try to fool us and throw in a twist. Did you know Harry was not going to die? The Prophecy, after all, does not state that Harry is the one who WILL defeat Voldemort, just that he has the power to do so. Perhaps it was by letting Voldemort kill him, his final Horcrux. ;-)
> > 
> > It did not fool me, but I did not worry much about the Prophecy and it was not the source of my certainty.
> 
Montavilla47 responded:
> 
> The whole fun of having a prophecy in a story is having it come true in an unexpected way.  For example, the prophecies about Macbeth promised that he was safe until Birnum Wood came to Dunsinane (I apologize if I'm misspelling any of that), and that "none of woman born" could harm him.
> 
> Of course, we get the wood coming to Dunsinane in an entirely unexpected way, and we have Macduff's story of being "untimely ripped" from his mother's womb.
> 
> And then there's Oedipus, whose parents try to kill him to avoid his prophecy, only to create the conditions for the prediction to come true.
> 
Carol responds:
In a sense, JKR is following this tradition. The Prophecy is certainly ambiguous and it's activated by someone trying to thwart it (in this case, Voldemort). I'm not sure that she succeeded in making it come true in an unexpected way, though, at least not as successfully as Shakespeare and Sophocles did. (Sophocles, in any case, was working with traditional material; I'm not sure how much he changed or added with regard to that prophecy.) JKR's Prophecy is longer and more complex. I'm not sure what model, if any, she was working from, but in any case, she subverts the tradition by having Dumbledore treat the Prophecy with skepticism (while nevertheless taking care to protect and teach the Prophecy Boy until it was time for him to fulfill it).

As someone coming to the HP books after a lifetime of reading and rereading LOTR, I found his skepticism disconcerting at best. Of course, I didn't want events to be predetermined. What fun is that? The characters become mere puppets. But a prophecy should be a prophecy, and words should have power (IOW, there should be a good reason not to say Voldemort's name, as there finally is in DH). JKR is clearly trying to subvert that tradition, yet she also wants the Prophecy to come true. Trying to have her cake and eat it, too, apparently.

Montavilla47:
> I would have liked to have an explanation for the prophecy--

Carol responds:
We do get an explanation for some of its elements. I think we need to look at the whole thing again, not just the single line that Harry reduces it to.

"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives... the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies..."

"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord" is clearly Harry (once Voldemort has chosen him and activated the Prophecy). Parents who have "thrice defied him" is, admittedly, not explained, but merely joining the Order would have constituted one defiance and we can suppose for the sake of argument that they actively battled Death Eaters twice before Harry was conceived and/or born. "Born as the seventh month dies" is, of course, the basis for narrowing down the Prophecy child to Harry and Neville and perhaps ultimately Harry. (I know that DD says LV chose the Half-Blood over the Pure-blood as having more in common with him, but July 31 is also a shade closer than July 30 to the "death" of the seventh month.

"The Dark Lord will mark him as his equal" is also explained. LV literally marks Harry with the scar, identifying him to all and sundry in the WW as "the Boy Who Lived" but also "marks" him as his "equal" in a figurative sense by giving him the powers from the soul fragment, Parseltongue and a window into LV's soul and mind, powers without which Harry probably could not have defeated him. (After hearing the Prophecy, Harry regards himself as a "marked man" in another sense, that of someone marked for death, as he certainly has been by Voldemort since before he was born.) "He will have power the Dark Lord knows not" has probably been clear from the beginning and becomes more so when Harry drives Voldemort from his mind through the power of love. We've had the motif of love as ancient magic and the power of self-sacrificial love since SS/PS, and, of course, it's the power of love that, in complicated ways, enables Harry to destroy the soul bit in the scar and survive the ordeal.

Since the last lines repeat the first, that leaves only the two crucial lines, one of which tends to be forgotten because Harry himself never repeats it (probably thinking that it's self-evident but possibly just considering it too painful to think about), "Either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives."

Montavilla 47:
["Neither can live while the other survives"] only works if you use the word "live" to mean "live a full, happy life." And it only works for Harry, because Harry's the one who has to get rid of Voldemort before he can start enjoying things like snogging. 

Carol responds:
I used to think that, but now I'm pretty sure that the line had nothing to do with living or surviving in daily life. We can't ignore the previous line, "Either must die at the hand of the other," which obviously refers to the final confrontation though "either" is ambiguous and could mean either "one" or "both." This line allows three possible outcomes: both can die, somehow killing each other, which might well have happened if Harry had fought back rather than allowing Voldemort to "kill" him; Voldemort can die at Harry's hand (which sort of happened though Harry didn't kill him; he died from his own rebounding curse); or Harry can die and Voldemort can survive (which would have happened, I think, if Nagini hadn't still been alive when Harry sacrificed himself). The only impossible outcome is for both to survive the final battle "*for* neither can live while the other survives." IOW, "neither can live while the other survives" is linked to "either must did at the hand of the other" by the conjunction "for" indicating a cause/effect relationship between them. Put in simple English, one must kill the other (or both must kill each other) *because* "neither can live while the other survives" the final battle. IOW, only one (or neither) can survive. Once the Horcruxes are destroyed, there can be only one survivor.

Maybe that's not what JKR intended, but it's the only interpretation I can come up with that makes sense (despite its meaning apparently being crystal clear to Harry, who said after hearing the Prophecy the first time," "It means one of us will have to kill the other, doesn't it?" (quoted from memory) and from that point until his trip into Snape's memories thought it meant that he must either murder or be murdered.

The only hard part for JKR was how to have Harry survive the destruction of his soul bit and come back to have LV die by his hand without being "murdered." He needed to be hoist with his own petard again, this time for good.

Montavilla47: 
> Except for getting paged all the time by his Death Eaters, Voldemort's existence post-GoF would have been much the same whether or not Harry was alive.  He was having a high time killing people and taking over the world.

Carol responds:

I disagree. Killing Harry was still his top priority, and had he succeeded in GoF or DH, *then* he would have had a "high time killing people and taking over the world." The Priori Incantatem in GoF didn't matter quite as much as we expected because he first thought that the Prophecy would tell him how to kill Harry, and when that failed, he kidnapped Ollivander, found out about the twin cores, and tried to get around the problem by borrowing Lucius's wand. Had he not found the "right" Harry and chased after him, triggering the holly wand's attack on him, he probably wouldn't have gone all over Europe trying to find the Elder Wand. He would have tried to lay yet another trap for Harry while continuing his plans for the Ministry takeover. But Harry's wand's spell triggered yet another inquisition of Ollivander, leading him on the Elder Wand quest, which distracted him from his quest for world dominance in the search for an instrument with which to do it (and, of course, to kill Harry as well). Had it not been for Harry's wand's attack on him, he would never have questioned the power of his own. (And if Harry hadn't dropped the photo of Grindelwald at Godric's Hollow, or had never gone there, LV might still have been searching for the Elder Wand when he discovered that Harry had stolen a Horcrux.)

At any rate, only if he'd succeeded in killing Harry on one of those occasions or if he'd never heard of the Elder Wand (IMO) would he have sat down to enjoy the Ministry takeover and begun the sort of rule we see him contemplating in "The Dark Lord Rising." Instead, he lets the DEs enjoy their takeover while he searches for the Elder Wand, killing about five people on the way (including an innocent woman and, presumably, her children) wanting to be interrupted only if they caught Harry Potter and not for mundane Ministry matters.

Carol, who supposes that Britain was just as well off with LV out of the country and preoccupied but still wishing that JKR had found some other way than the Elder Wand for Harry to defeat LV





From dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com  Sun May 31 23:44:29 2009
From: dumbledore11214 at yahoo.com (dumbledore11214)
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 23:44:29 -0000
Subject: Prophecies and Chosen Ones
In-Reply-To: <gvuu6d+rbf@eGroups.com>
Message-ID: <gvv4ot+7p38@eGroups.com>

No: HPFGUIDX 186812

Carol responds:
<SNIP> 
As someone coming to the HP books after a lifetime of reading and rereading
LOTR, I found his skepticism disconcerting at best. Of course, I didn't want
events to be predetermined. What fun is that? The characters become mere
puppets. But a prophecy should be a prophecy, and words should have power (IOW,
there should be a good reason not to say Voldemort's name, as there finally is
in DH). JKR is clearly trying to subvert that tradition, yet she also wants the
Prophecy to come true. Trying to have her cake and eat it, too, apparently. <SNIP>

Alla:

Ah, maybe that is it ? trying to have her cake and eat it too. I did not find Dumbledore skepticism disconcerting at all, in fact at first I found it encouraging. As I said  in the post that started this thread  I found the existence of the prophecy to be disappointing, but I am not sure if I was clear why. I was indeed thinking that prophecy makes characters puppets in many ways. Thus I was alt least happy that Dumbledore was skeptical about the prophecy, but then he also seemed to put his hopes in it and guarded Harry as he saw fit at least.

I find it amusing in a sense that in Rick Riordan's world which is in many ways SUPPOSED to be predetermined world, since it is a world of Greek Gods and their offsprings with mortals in our time, that in that world he managed to do the prophecy so well and so surprisingly too IMO. And no, prophecy there does not just make sense if you substitute one word for the word with opposite meaning lol.

But I thought that JKR's world was supposed to be about choices and free will, however now I think that the only free will in Potterverse is to be able to choose the will of the epitome of goodness. In a sense I think that how it all played out was done very well and very consistently with the theme that JKR was pursuing.  I just found it a little, I don't know, bleak?




 Montavilla 47:
["Neither can live while the other survives"] only works if you use the word
"live" to mean "live a full, happy life." And it only works for Harry, because
Harry's the one who has to get rid of Voldemort before he can start enjoying
things like snogging.

Carol responds:
I used to think that, but now I'm pretty sure that the line had nothing to do
with living or surviving in daily life. We can't ignore the previous line,
"Either must die at the hand of the other," which obviously refers to the final
confrontation though "either" is ambiguous and could mean either "one" or
"both." This line allows three possible outcomes: both can die, somehow killing
each other, which might well have happened if Harry had fought back rather than
allowing Voldemort to "kill" him; Voldemort can die at Harry's hand (which sort
of happened though Harry didn't kill him; he died from his own rebounding
curse); or Harry can die and Voldemort can survive (which would have happened, I
think, if Nagini hadn't still been alive when Harry sacrificed himself). The
only impossible outcome is for both to survive the final battle "*for* neither
can live while the other survives." IOW, "neither can live while the other
survives" is linked to "either must did at the hand of the other" by the
conjunction "for" indicating a cause/effect relationship between them. Put in
simple English, one must kill the other (or both must kill each other) *because*
"neither can live while the other survives" the final battle. IOW, only one (or
neither) can survive. Once the Horcruxes are destroyed, there can be only one
survivor.

<SNIP>

Alla:

But I do not know how Either must die line means that Neither can live line refers to the outcome of the final battle. I mean, I understand the interpretation, but isn't it again adding too much to the Prophecy? I thought that prophecy should make sense (at the end of course) on its own merits.

I mean, I also really really like the interpretation that Pippin and Zara suggested that live actually means die, and I think it works more than well, I think it works perfectly, but that requires the substitute of the whole world to its antonym, right? I am just not sure how this is a fair play on author's part.